Kohonen SOFM IS

Solution(By Examveda Team)

A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is a type of artificial neural network (ANN) that is trained using unsupervised learning to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional), discretized representation of the input space of the training samples, called a map, and is therefore a method to do dimensionality reduction. Self-organizing maps differ from other artificial neural networks as they apply competitive learning as opposed to error-correction learning (such as backpropagation with gradient descent), and in the sense that they use a neighborhood function to preserve the topological properties of the input space.
A self-organizing map showing U.S. Congress voting patterns. The input data was a table with a row for each member of Congress, and columns for certain votes containing each member's yes/no/abstain vote. The SOM algorithm arranged these members in a two-dimensional grid placing similar members closer together. The first plot shows the grouping when the data are split into two clusters. The second plot shows average distance to neighbours: larger distances are darker. The third plot predicts Republican (red) or Democratic (blue) party membership. The other plots each overlay the resulting map with predicted values on an input dimension: red means a predicted 'yes' vote on that bill, blue means a 'no' vote. The plot was created in Synapse.

This makes SOMs useful for visualizing low-dimensional views of high-dimensional data, akin to multidimensional scaling. The artificial neural network introduced by the Finnish professor Teuvo Kohonen in the 1980s is sometimes called a Kohonen map or network. The Kohonen net is a computationally convenient abstraction building on biological models of neural systems from the 1970s and morphogenesis models dating back to Alan Turing in the 1950s.

Like most artificial neural networks, SOMs operate in two modes: training and mapping. "Training" builds the map using input examples (a competitive process, also called vector quantization), while "mapping" automatically classifies a new input vector.

Source : wikipedia.org