Tips for Processing and Color-coding of Self-Organizing Maps

Abstract

The most important aspects for creating good SOM maps are the selection of the size and shape of the SOM, the scaling of the input variables, the selection of the neighborhood function and the learning rate, and the initialization of the model vectors. In addition, we discuss automatic procedures for color-coding of SOM maps. The data entries corresponding to, for example, different countries can be automatically colored so that similar data attain a similar color.