Classification of fragmented pottery with the use of Kohonen self-organising maps (case study from the Hlyboke Ozero-2 settlement in Eastern Ukraine)

Abstract

The paper is devoted to testing Kohonen self-organising maps, with elliptic Fourier coefficients as quantitative variables, for the task of morphological classification of fragmented and non-standardised ceramics. The advantage of the methodology used is its ability to account for the systematic statistical relationships inherent in the dataset, build models of varying degrees of generalisation and visualise multivariate data. The approbation of the method was carried out on materials from the Hlyboke Ozero-2 settlement in Eastern Ukraine. The results are compared with the results obtained using principal component analysis + k-means clustering.