Using neural networks for data mining

Neural networks have been successfully applied in a wide range of supervised and unsuper vised learning applications Neural network methods are not commonly used for data mining tasks however because they often produce incomprehensible models and require long training times In this article we describe neural network learning algorithms that are able to produce comprehensible models and that do not require excessive training times Speci cally we discuss two classes of approaches for data mining with neural networks The rst type of approach often called rule extraction involves extracting symbolic models from trained neural networks The second approach is to directly learn simple easy to understand networks We argue that given the current state of the art neural network methods deserve a place in the tool boxes of data mining specialists