Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering This book covers neural networks with special emphasis on advanced learning methodologies and applications. It includes practical issues of weight initializations, stalling of learning, and escape from a local minima, which have not been covered by many existing books in this area. Additionally, the book highlights the important feature selection problem, which baffles many neural networks practitioners because of the difficulties handling large datasets. It also contains several interesting IT, engineering and bioinformatics applications.