gri6507 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
I am currently participating in a Neural Networks Controls class at school. As the name implies, the purpose of the class is to design Neural Networks to control complex systems. The professor has left most of the implementation of the material open-ended. He, of course, suggested we do our net training and modeling in Matlab. Personally, I have two problems with his suggestion. First, I am not very comfortable using Matlab. Second, The version of Matlab I have access to is installed on a Celeron 700MHz computer with 128MB of ram, which takes way too long to do the countless mathematical operations needed to train and simulate a net.
Given these concerns, and the fact that I have at my disposal a dual blade 1.4GHz Sun with 2GB if ram, I would like to do all computations on that machine. However, it does not have Matlab (does Matlab even exist for non-Windows?). Therefore, I was hoping to use Perl for my assignments.
I searched CPAN for neural net modules and came across a number of possibilities including AI::NeuralNet::BackProp, AI::NeuralNet::Simple, AI::NNFlex, AI::Perceptron, and AI::jNeural::arch::neuron. Has anyone had any experience with these modules? Any recommendations on which one to use? Any other suggestions are also welcome.
Thanks in advance.