Neural networks in geophysical applications

Neural networks are increasingly popular in geophysics. Because they are universal approximators, these tools can approximate any continuous function with an arbitrary precision. Hence, they may yield important contributions to finding solutions to a variety of geophysical applications. However, knowledge of many methods and techniques recently developed to increase the performance and to facilitate theuseof neural networks does not seem to be widespread in the geophysical community. Therefore, thepowerof these toolshasnot yetbeenexplored to their full extent. In this paper, techniques are described for faster training, better overall performance, i.e., generalization, and the automatic estimation of network size and architecture.