A self-organizing map (SOM) is an artificial neural network with objective class discovery that uses a neighborhood function to preserve the topological properties of a dataset to produce low-dimensional (typically 2) discretized representation of the training data set. A set of artificial neurons learn to map points in an input space to coordinates in an output space. The input space can have different dimensions and topology from the output space, and the SOM will attempt to preserve these.
A self-organizing map (SOM) is an artificial neural network with objective class discovery that uses a neighborhood function to preserve the topological properties of a dataset to produce low-dimensional (typically 2) discretized representation of the training data set. A set of artificial neurons learn to map points in an input space to coordinates in an output space. The input space can have different dimensions and topology from the output space, and the SOM will attempt to preserve these.