In recent years, neural networks have been used as a tool for modeling an industrial process. An improvement in their performance may be expected either by divining more efficient training algorithms or by intelligently manipulating the data set. The second method is examined. The problem chosen is one of predicting the properties of cotton yarn from the fiber properties. When the input data are known to correlate with each other, principal component analysis can be used to improve the performance of neural networks. (C) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.