ABSTRACT
a great deal of attention has been paid in the scientific literature to Neural Networks (NN) as alternative models of information processing. The principal inspiration of NN is the human brain whose structure is constituted by a large number of connected neurons. This chapter commences with a concise historical overview of NN. It then describes the general architecture of NN and illustrates with some examples of different structures. The chapter also considers some recent applications of NN in the field of urban and regional economics. It seems interesting to investigate indepth NN potential and their ‘hidden’ rules, as well as to look for new hardware technologies able to improve the speediness of execution. In conclusion, NN appear to be a new computational tool offering interesting results in several research areas, as is witnessed by the increasing number of NN applications.
