neuralnet: Training of Neural Networks

Abstract

Artificial neural networks are applied in many situations. neuralnet is built to train multi-layer perceptrons in the context of regression analyses, i.e. to approximate functional relationships between covariates and response variables. Thus, neural networks are used as extensions of generalized linear models. neuralnet is a very flexible package. The backpropagation algorithm and three versions of resilient backpropagation are implemented and it provides a custom-choice of activation and error function. An arbitrary number of covariates and response variables as well as of hidden layers can theoretically be included. The paper gives a brief introduction to multilayer perceptrons and resilient backpropagation and demonstrates the application of neuralnet using the data set infert, which is contained in the R distribution.