increase performances in neural networks I am starting being interested in neural networks, and I am writing some code about it. But, differently from methods like support vector machines, random forests,..etc., to me it seems more like a black box which I can't control. 

So my question is:

What are methods to increase accuracy and other performances in a neural network? 

Thanks in advance.
basically you should try to use regularization/dropout/batch-normalization and find out the optimal hyper-parameters to improve performance of your model.

After applying these optimizations you can use Randomized Search to find optimal hyper-parameters