Why Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are an artificial intelligence methodology that allows the identification of predictive mathematical models directly from the experimental data, e.g. without the need for prior mechanistic knowledge. Therefore, if you have data for assumed causes and effects ANN are capable of learning the dependencies by themselves. Artificial learning offers the best solution for many "real world" problems. Here are three such examples where ANN outperform other methods:

Financial application:
Credit history --> likelihood of repayment

Medical application:
Clinical symptoms --> diagnose of disease