5 Excel Neural Network Add-Ins

The five neural network Excel add-ins listed below make the job of using neural networks fairly straightforward. They all automate the training and testing process to some extent and some allow the neural network architecture and training process to be tuned. 4Cast XL This product is easy to use but comes with some advanced features. These include more than 2 output nodes (most other neural networks have just a single node), graphing capabilities, pre-processing and data scaling, and other options for architecture specification and training modes. More advanced than some other Excel add-in alternatives. Very low price of US$ 36 and this includes other tools and various manuals/how-to books. Alyuda Forecaster This automates much of the neural network building process and boasts automatic neural network architecture and parameter selection. Various graphics support validation of the models and provide statistics on accuracy. A single user licence comes in at US$197 and unlimited site at US$997 NeuralTools6 Palisade provide a number of decision support tools and NeuralTools6 is their neural network offering. It provides a great deal of functionality including training sensitivity analysis to establish the reliability of models. Setting up training, testing and prediction is pretty well automatic and accommodates data spanning multiple worksheets. The neural network manager allows the inevitable large collections of neural networks to be managed easily and both categorical and numerical data are automatically identified. This is an easy to use tool for both end users and analysts. User licence costs GBP 695 for the Industrial version and GBP 495 for the Professional version with a 1000 cases per dataset limit. NeuroSolutions for Excel NeuroSolutions provide several neural network products and the Excel add-in is both simple to use, but has advanced features for those who need them. The Leave-N-Out training lets users omit different data sections in each training run. The result is more robust models. It also features and express builder that automatically builds trains and tests multiple neural network topologies and reports on the best performing models. Licences cost US$295. NeuroXL One of several tools provided by Olsoft, NeuroXL Predictor is very easy to use with simple selection of training data and test data. A small number of parameters can be tuned (training rate for example) if necessary, but the product suggests suitable values. Licences cost US$ 99.95.

The only requirement that you need is familiarity with MS Excel. If you want to build neural network based forecasting model with MS Excel, then reading this book is a great way to start. Now you can study at home with your own personal neural network model and perform practical experiments that help you fully understand how easy neural networks can be. Study neural networks through practical experiments. Design and evaluate your own neural networks. Observe a neural network's response graphically. Combine several neural networks to give advanced behaviour.

This book comes with 5 practical models that act as a starting point allowing you to experiment with neural network training and testing. All these neural network models are created with MS Excel spreadsheet. These models include

i. ii. iii. iv. v.

Determining Risk For Credit Approval, Sales Forecasting, Predicting Dow Jones/stock weekly prices, Predicting Real Estate Value, Classify Type of Flowers

Once you are comfortable with the practicalities of using a neural network then perhaps you can simply tailor one of the preexisting spreadsheets for your own use. However, if you need to develop your own unique model then you will find that this book has the materials that you can reference to build one on your own. If one of the accompanying neural network models is suitable and need no customizing then it is a fairly simple matter to set up your analysis. Your data is placed into the input field, the neural network parameters are specified together with any goals or outputs. Then your neural network is trained after which it is shown the data to be analysed. After that, you can act as teacher for a neural network by providing it with data and letting it know the goals it should learn. The neural network can then train itself using the data and goals provided, and during training can provide feedback on how well it is doing. Once you are satisfied that it has trained sufficiently well then it is ready to make a prediction about some new data. Assuming that the new data is derived from the same or similar sources as the training data then the neural network will be able to recognize features consistent with its past learning and advise you on its evaluation or prediction.