because of preprocessing and needing to choose the functions that'll do the approximation - the process itself is semi-automatic, not fully automatic. ANN's inn

because of preprocessing and needing to choose the functions that'll do the approximation - the process itself is semi-automatic, not fully automatic. ANN's inner nodes are specific functions that need parameter tweaking (after choosing the right ones that is) - vector machines have different kinds for different data, etc. and those two things are very domain specific so you need to do a lot of homework first, and debugging later.