Bias-variance dilemma (Geman et al., 1992). It can be demonstrated that the mean square value of the estimation error between the function to be modelled and the neural network consists of the sum of the (squared) bias and variance. With a neural network using a training set of fixed size, a small bias can only be achieved with a large variance (Haykin, 1994). This dilemma can be circumvented if the training set is made very large, but if the total amount of data is limited, this may not be possible.