Neural Networks: New Tools For Data Analysis ?

Neural network models have been successfully used in many disciplines such as psychology, computer science, genetics, linguistics and engineering. Recently neural networks are also applied in economics and consumer psychology. We review the statistical properties of multi-layer networks for a better understanding of the usefulness of neural networks as a tool for data-analysis in the social sciences. As an application we analyze the data in a marketing problem, specifically sales’ people projiles. We compare the results obtained with two type of neural networks: multilayer perceptrons and learning vector quantization networks, with a traditional statistical method, in this case discriminant analysis. Finally, we evaluate the use of neural networks as a research tool in economics and marketing.