Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a type of artificial neural network that is trained using unsupervised learning to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional), discretized representation of the input space of the training samples, called a map, and is, therefore, a method to do dimensionality reduction. Self-organizing maps differ from other artificial neural networks as they apply competitive learning as opposed to error-correction learning (such as backpropagation with gradient descent), and in the sense that they use a neighborhood function to preserve the topological properties of the input space. This makes SOMs useful for visualizing low-dimensional views of high-dimensional data. Like most artificial neural networks, SOMs operate in two modes: training and mapping. “Training” builds the map using input, while “mapping” automatically classifies a new input vector. A self-organizing map consists of components called nodes or neurons. Associated with each node are a weight vector of the same dimension as the input data vectors and a position in the map space. The usual arrangement of nodes is a two-dimensional regular spacing in a hexagonal or rectangular grid. The procedure for placing a vector from data space onto the map is to find the node with the closest weight vector to the data space vector.
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