Preprocess the Data

The first step in many problems is to preprocess the data to put it in a form that is most useful to the neural network. There are many different preprocessing functions that NeuroSolutions for Excel can perform, but here are three of the most commonly used ones:

Randomize Rows
In many cases your data may be ordered such that similar inputs may be grouped together. This can cause a problem when training a neural network in that the network may be trained on one group of input data and then tested on a group of data that has little similarity to the training data. You want to try to have your training data be representative of the entire data set. NeuroSolutions for Excel can handle this by randomizing the rows of the data set before training.

Translate Symbolic Columns
Neural networks require that you feed them numeric input and desired output data. There are many problems where you want the neural network to process textual information such as "red", "green" and "blue". NeuroSolutions for Excel can handle this case by translating this textual information into columns of 0's and 1's.

Clean Data
Neural networks require that you have some numerical value for every input and desired output of every row. Often with real-world data there are missing values, leaving empty or invalid cells in your Excel spreadsheet. NeuroSolutions for Excel will allow you to fill in those cells with an interpolated value, or perform one of several other calculations to clean the data.

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