AbstractHere we study the multivariate quantitative approximation of complex valued continuous functions on a box of RN , N ∈ N, by the multivariate normalized type neural network operators. We investigate also the case of approximation by iterated multilayer neural network operators. These approximations are achieved by establishing multidimen-sional Jackson type inequalities involving the multivariate moduli of continuity of the en- gaged function and its partial derivatives. Our multivariate operators are defined by using a multidimensional density function induced by a q-deformed and λ-parametrized hyper-bolic tangent function, which is a sigmoid function. The approximations are pointwise and uniform. The related feed-forward neural network are with one or multi hidden layers. The basis of our theory are the introduced multivariate Taylor formulae of trigonometric and hyperbolic type.