chapter 1 From Data to Models: Complexity and Challenges in Understanding Biological, Ecological, and Natural Systems -- chapter 2 Fundamentals of Neural Networks and Models for Linear Data Analysis -- chapter 3 Neural Networks for Nonlinear Pattern Recognition -- chapter 4 Learning of Nonlinear Patterns by Neural Networks -- chapter 5 Implementation of Neural Network Models for Extracting Reliable Patterns from Data -- chapter 6 Data Exploration, Dimensionality Reduction, and Feature Extraction -- chapter 7 Assessment of Uncertainty of Neural Network Models Using Bayesian Statistics -- chapter 8 Discovering Unknown Clusters in Data with Self-Organizing Maps -- chapter 9 Neural Networks for Time-Series Forecasting.