Neural Networks Applications in Economics: a Statistical Point of View

Nowadays neural networks (NN) are applied in the most various fields and are actually receiving a lot of attention among the researcher's community. In this paper we will provide a review of some NN applications in Economics. We distinguish the applications according to the main objectives achieved by NN in this field: prediction, classification and modeling economic theory. It is a matter of fact that NN share with Statistics a lot of methodological and computational aspects [9] as well as many fields of application. In this field we introduce a general strategy for a statistical approach to NN which allows to use NN in a statistical context taking into account typical statistical applications problems, such as the selection and coding of the variables, the sample representativeness but more the interpretation, visualization and stability of the results.