Descriptive statistics

The in-sample data consisted of 440 cases (80% of the whole sample), while the rest of 20% of the data were used as the hold-out sample (111 cases). For the purpose of the 10-fold cross validation the in-sample data were divided into 10 equally sized independent samples, each of them consisted of 44 cases, and NN models were cross validated following the procedure described in previous section. Each training subsample consisted of 396 training cases, furtherly splitted into two subsamples (264 cases for training the network and 132 cases for early stopping, and optimizing the network topology). The experiments were conducted using Statistica Neural Network software.