ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS OF THE SELF-ORGANIZING MAP

The self-organizing map (SOM) method is a new, powerful software teal for the visualization of high-dimensional data. It concerts complex, n onlinear statistical relationships between high-dimensional data into simple geometric relationships on a low-dimensional display. As if the reby compresses information while preserving the most important topolo gical and metric relationships of the primary data elements on the dis play, it may also be thought ro produce some kind of abstractions. The se two aspects, visualization and abstraction, occur in a number of co mplex engineering tasks such as process analysis, machine perception, control, and communication. The term self-organizing map signifies a c lass of mappings defined by error-theoretic consideration. In practice they result in certain unsupervised, competitive learning processes, computed by simple-looking SOM algorithms, The first SOM algorithms we re conceived around 1981-1982, and the popularity of the more advanced SOM methods is growing at a steady pace. Many industries have found t he SOM-based software tools useful. The most important property of the SOM, orderliness of the input-output mapping, can be utilized for man y tasks: reduction of the amount of training data, speeding up learnin g, nonlinear interpolation and extrapolation, generalization, and effe ctive compression of information for its transmission.