Economies clustering using SOM-based dissimilarity

Abstract

Clustering of countries and economies has been done for a long time by expert comparing to ideal theoretical entities. More recently a data driven approach has been taken, including, so called, black box methods. In this paper a SOM-based dissimilarity measure is presented and used for agglomerative hierarchical clustering of economies. It turns out that the results differ significantly from those obtained via a more traditional Euclidean distance based approach.