Best neural network resource

Today i happened to find the best neural network resource (according to me). It almost has every thing from sample data sets to awesome tutorials. Check it out

Introducing JNNHelperNB 1.0b

Check the new JNNHelperNB here, a GUI helper tool based on Netbeans Platform 6.7. It is completely ported and is now easier to maintain and develop. We are planning to include an auto update feature and an online gallery of the contributed plugins for the available SPI's. This tool can be checked out from subversion repository using the following command:

svn checkout https://jneuralnet.dev.java.net/svn/jneuralnet/trunk JNNHelperNB --username guest
(leave password field blank when prompted)

Also, the visual network view is being replaced by widgets of Visual API. It'll be included along with property sheets for editing neuron properties in the next milestone release.

As of June 10th 2009, JNNHelper tool development is obsolete. Use the project issue tracker to add your wish list.

The Netbeans experience

It has only been a week since we started porting our application 'JNNHelper' to netbeans platform and we are already seeing its benefits.

The lookup API is doing an awesome job in decoupling module dependencies which was otherwise going haywire. We are glad that there is so much documentation available out there...moreover Netbeans mailing lists rock, most of our questions actually get answered!

We can only hope that out new application 'JNNHelperNB' will be out there by the end of this month. We are planning to add many new features in this release including the use of Visual API for cooler visualization and fine grained customization support using property sheets.

Temperature forecasting sample...

Finally we managed to test the application for a real world situation. Check out the temperature forecasting folder in documents and downloads section of JNeuralNet home. It has a detailed project report on how such an application was built (along with the necessary mathematical background, not required..optional).

It marks a big achievement as the prediction has an average of 83% success rate on unknown data sets. More over using the JNNHelper tool this has been acheived in 5 mins (including training and analysis).

Future plans for JNeuralNet

The following are the changes planned for the project.

• We were planning to cluster out JNNHelper tool as a sub project of JNeuralNet.

• Move project to subversion for nightly builds. Only the milestone releases will be available for direct download.

Enhancements include:

• Add project save and load.

• Neural network check pointing while training (thanks to chandan for this idea)

• Wizard to create new algorithms

• Inbuilt editor for creating pluggable components.

• On online gallery of pluggable components, these will further be available as online updates for the GUI tool.

• Property sheets for fine grained customization of the neural network.

The last four enhancements are the reason we are planning to move onto Netbeans platform. It has extensive documentation at Netbeans Platform Home. I personally found these screencasts to be excellent, a must see if you want to learn the netbeans platform.

These enhancements will be added in the next milestone release (hopefully). Suggestions and comments are welcome.

We are also planning to include screen casts for tool usage, plugin development and demo applications using Wink, contributors are more than welcome.

All New JNeuralNet

Its been a long time since i have blogged...was busy with acads and other stuff. Any ways, there have been several exciting updates to the JNeuralNet project.

• Its now possible to create pluggable extensions of activation function, learning algorithm, cost functions, input and output preprocessors and datastores. For more information on these spi's please visit the project home

• An all new JNNHelper tool 1.2 featuring stable network builder, data builder, trainer and analyzer.

• We have also included a temperature forecasting application as a demo using the helper tool (included a detailed project report)
  

• Fully updated javadocs (finally) , architecture docs and other support documentation.
  

Test drive the application, criticisms and suggestions are more than welcome. please use the projects mailing lists for that.

Enhancements Planned

While trying to build an application using JNeuralNetwork i've realized that a few things were missing.

1) Activation function choice - The default sigmoid activation is not a very good choice if the output range is other than (0, 1). Hence an interface is planned and its default inplementations of popular types are planned.

2) Plugin architecture for learning algo's and activation functions using java service discovery. This feature is planned to be integrated into the helper tool. Also an editor is provided to create new types, generate plugins to aid in development.

3) XML based save and load for neural networks.

4) An option of JAR export is planned. This is needed incase plugins are used. The exported jars are to be included in the library of a larger application using the neural network. One simply has to call MyNN.getOutput(input) to get the prediction...No need to know ANY of the base API's.

The above features are under development and will be out there by the end of february...