A Radial Basis Function Neural Network for Stochastic Frontier Analyses of General Multivariate Production and Cost Functions

Production function techniques often impose functional form and other restrictions that limit their applicability. One common limitation in popular production function techniques is the requirement that all inputs and outputs must be positive numbers. There is a need to develop a production function analysis technique that is less restrictive in the assumptions it makes, and inputs it can process. This paper proposes such a general technique by linking fields of neural networks and econometrics. Specifically, two radial basis function (RBF) neural networks are proposed for stochastic production and cost frontier analyses. The functional forms of production and cost functions are considered unknown except that they are multivariate. Using simulated and real-world datasets, experiments are performed, and results are provided. The results illustrate that the proposed technique has broad applicability and performs equal to or better than the traditional stochastic frontier analysis technique.