Since you have 5 or 6 given alternatives without any order or other structure, you could look into multinomial logistic regression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinomial_logistic_regression Some examples (using the nnet package from CRAN, for neural networks) can be found here: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/dae/mlogit.htm See also http://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=multinomial+logistic+regressionhttps://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=multinomial+logistic+regression for a list of questions and answers about multinomial logistic regression on this site.