1. Introduction
After being extremely popular in the early 1990s, neural networks have fallen out of favor in research in the last 5 years. In 2000, it was even pointed out by the organizers of the Neural Information Processing System (NIPS) conference that the term “neural networks” in the submission title was negatively correlated with acceptance. In contrast, positive correlations were made with support vector machines (SVMs), Bayesian networks, and variational methods.