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In the study of associations between genomic data and complex phenotypes there may be relationships that are not amenable to parametric statistical modeling. Such associations have been investigated mainly using single-marker and Bayesian linear regression models that differ in their distributions, but that assume additive inheritance while ignoring interactions and non-linearity. When interactions have been included in the model, their effects have entered linearly. There is a growing interest in non-parametric methods for predicting quantitative traits based on reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces regressions on markers and radial basis functions. Artificial neural networks (ANN) provide an alternative, because these act as universal approximators of complex functions and can capture non-linear relationships between predictors and responses, with the interplay among …