<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  Geocomputational methods and modeling > Artificial Neural Networks (ANN)

Artificial neural networks (ANNs), sometimes referred to as computational neural networks (CNNs), are an attempt to emulate features of biological neural networks in order to address a range of difficult information processing, analysis and modeling problems. Section 8.3.1, Introduction to artificial neural networks, includes several examples of the application of ANN to practical problems in spatial analysis, including land-use classification and spatial interaction modeling. Within the field of spatial analysis only certain types of ANNs have been found to be especially useful to date. This is not to say that other forms of ANN, developed within the computational science field, are not applicable to such problems, but rather that these areas have yet to be explored in depth. There is also considerable ongoing debate as to whether such methods simply amount to data fitting, with little or no value beyond that of description, an issue that will become clearer as we discuss the issue of generalization of such methods to unseen datasets.

It is important to note that ANN-technology lies at the heart of many modern AI-software services, including regenerative AI and much of the AI-augmented facilities provided within some large-scale web-based services, such as Microsoft AI Earth project (now re-badged as The Planetary Computer service - Application examples are illustrated on the service site: https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/applications ). ESRI now provide an optional GeoAI Toolbox that includes four main sets of tools: Features and tabular data; Imagery; Text; and (Spatio-temporal) Time series. In all cases the tools include facilities for designing models based on substantive sets of training data, and then applying these Machine Learning (ML) models to different categories of data to provide predictions and/or forecasts. These tools can be extremely demanding in terms of data, processing and graphics display handling, and technical skills of the analyst.