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POWhat are advantages of Artificial Neural Networks over Support Vector Machines?
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copied!<p>ANN (Artificial Neural Networks) and SVM (Support Vector Machines) are two popular strategies for supervised machine learning and classification. It's not often clear which method is better for a particular project, and I'm certain the answer is always "it depends." Often, a combination of both along with Bayesian classification is used.</p> <p>These questions on Stackoverflow have already been asked regarding ANN vs SVM:</p> <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8326485/ann-and-svm-classification">ANN and SVM classification</a></p> <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7316671/what-the-difference-among-ann-svm-and-knn-in-my-classification-question">what the difference among ANN, SVM and KNN in my classification question</a></p> <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2434536/support-vector-machine-or-artificial-neural-network-for-text-processing">Support Vector Machine or Artificial Neural Network for text processing?</a></p> <p>In this question, I'd like to know <em>specifically</em> what aspects of an ANN (specifically, a Multilayer Perceptron) might make it desirable to use over an SVM? The reason I ask is because it's easy to answer the <em>opposite</em> question: Support Vector Machines are often superior to ANNs because they avoid two major weaknesses of ANNs:</p> <p>(1) ANNs often converge on <em>local minima</em> rather than global minima, meaning that they are essentially "missing the big picture" sometimes (or missing the forest for the trees)</p> <p>(2) ANNs often <em>overfit</em> if training goes on too long, meaning that for any given pattern, an ANN might start to consider the noise as part of the pattern.</p> <p>SVMs don't suffer from either of these two problems. However, it's not readily apparent that SVMs are meant to be a total replacement for ANNs. So what <em>specific</em> advantage(s) does an ANN have over an SVM that might make it applicable for certain situations? I've listed <em>specific</em> advantages of an SVM over an ANN, now I'd like to see a list of ANN advantages (if any).</p>

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