Modelling uncertainty in biomedical applications of neural networks

In this paper we argue that the explicit account of uncertainty in data modeling is particularly important for biomedical applications of neural networks and related techniques. There are several sources of uncertainty of a model, including noise, bias and variance. Unless one attempts to identify or minimize the sources that contribute to errors of a particular application, one only has a sub-optimal solution. If, on the other hand, one does attempt to model uncertainty, one gets several major advantages. We discuss several methods for modeling uncertainty, including density estimation, Bayesian inference and complex noise models, in the context of several sample applications - most notably in the domain of biosignal processing.