In this chapter, we examined two machine learning methods that offer a great deal of potential but are often overlooked due to their complexity. Hopefully you now realize that this reputation is at least somewhat undeserved. The basic concepts that drive ANNs and SVMs are fairly easy to understand.

On the other hand, because ANNs and SVMs have been around for many decades, each of them has numerous variations. This chapter just scratches the surface of what is possible with these methods. Yet by utilizing the terminology you learned here, you should be capable of picking up the nuances that distinguish the many advancements that are being developed every day.

Now that we have spent some time learning about many different types of predictive models from simple to sophisticated, in the next chapter we will begin to consider methods for other types of learning tasks. These unsupervised learning techniques will bring to light fascinating patterns within the data.