Validation of Neural Network Packages

The purpose of this GSoC project is to validate neural network packages that perform regression. It is a follow-up of a GSoC 2019 project in which we examined 49 packages::algorithms but we were short of time to publish the results in a clean format. We intend to correct some glitches in the 2019 code and use a more recent code prepared by one mentor during winter 2020 that is more flexible and permits an evaluation of all packages::algorithms in one run. Our NNbenchmark package, published on CRAN and regularly updated, will give the opportunity to package authors to eventually modify their code and benchmark it with the provided datasets against other packages. Finally, we will publish the results on a website and in an article to be published in the R-Journal.