Definition
SOM is a clustering and projecting algorithm that extracts meaningful patterns from complex data and displays them in an orderly fashion (Kohonen 1982, 2001).
Developed by Kohonen in the early 1980s (Kohonen 1982, 2001, 2014) the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is an unsupervised neural network that projects a high multidimensional dataset into a lower dimensional grid of ordered nodes or units.
The Self-Organizing Map can be defined as a vector quantizer, or more simply a spatially constrained form of k-means clustering, that learns from multidimensional data and presents them into a map of fewer dimensions (Ripley 1996). The output is a discretized representation of the input space of the training samples, generally a two-dimensional grid of mhexagonal cells. This is one of the best characteristics of the Self-Organizing Map that, as we will see, can translate, without strong statistical...
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Lucchini, M., Bussi, D. (2021). Self-Organizing Map. In: Maggino, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_104673-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_104673-1
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