Data Mining with Neural Nets (Python) (code.activestate.com)

If (like me) you didn't know what to make of this, the video of the talk by Raymond Hettinger is here: http://www.viddler.com/explore/python-italia/videos/85/ He starts with this example at ~9:30 in, and boy is it cool...

to be frank Neural Nets are out of fashion in both CS Research as well as Data Mining Practice. Try Algorithmic Game Theory, Probabilistic Algorithms, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Bayesian Nets, Support Vector Machines etc.

I don't how accurate it is to say they are not of use any more... agreed SVM's seem to be particularly good. But as far as I know, NN's seem to pretty well for handling data like signals... I think besides from being computationally expensive, the fact that there is very little possible analysis for linking the outputs with the inputs and their nature probably works against them.