This book provides an overview of self-organizing map formation, including recent developments. Self-organizing maps form a branch of unsupervised learning, which is the study of what can be determined about the statistical properties of input data without explicit feedback from a teacher. The articles are drawn from the journal Neural Computation.The book consists of five sections. The first section looks at attempts to model the organization of cortical maps and at the theory and applications of the related artificial neural network algorithms. The second section analyzes topographic maps and their formation via objective functions. The third section discusses cortical maps of stimulus features. The fourth section discusses self-organizing maps for unsupervised data analysis. The fifth section discusses extensions of self-organizing maps, including two surprising applications of mapping algorithms to standard computer science problems: combinatorial optimization and sorting. Contributors J. J. Atick, H. G. Barrow, H. U. Bauer, C. M. Bishop, H. J. Bray, J. Bruske, J. M. L. Budd, M. Budinich, V. Cherkassky, J. Cowan, R. Durbin, E. Erwin, G. J. Goodhill, T. Graepel, D. Grier, S. Kaski, T. Kohonen, H. Lappalainen, Z. Li, J. Lin, R. Linsker, S. P. Luttrell, D. J. C. MacKay, K. D. Miller, G. Mitchison, F. Mulier, K. Obermayer, C. Piepenbrock, H. Ritter, K. Schulten, T. J. Sejnowski, S. Smirnakis, G. Sommer, M. Svensen, R. Szeliski, A. Utsugi, C. K. I. Williams, L. Wiskott, L. Xu, A. Yuille, J. Zhang

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Advances in Self-Organizing Maps, WSOM 2009, held in St. Augustine, Florida, in June 2009. The 41 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers deal with topics in the use of SOM in many areas of social sciences, economics, computational biology, engineering, time series analysis, data visualization and theoretical computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps, WSOM 2011, held in Espoo, Finland, in June 2011. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on plenaries; financial and societal applications; theory and methodology; applications of data mining and analysis; language processing and document analysis; and visualization and image processing.

Self-organizing maps (SOMs) were developed by Teuvo Kohonen in the early eighties. Since then more than 10,000 works have been based on SOMs. SOMs are unsupervised neural networks useful for clustering and visualization purposes. Many SOM applications have been developed in engineering and science, and other fields. This book contains refereed papers presented at the 9th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (WSOM 2012) held at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, on December 12-14, 2012. The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners in the field of self-organizing systems. Among the book chapters there are excellent examples of the use of SOMs in agriculture, computer science, data visualization, health systems, economics, engineering, social sciences, text and image analysis, and time series analysis. Other chapters present the latest theoretical work on SOMs as well as Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) methods.

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM), with its variants, is the most popular artificial neural network algorithm in the unsupervised learning category. About 4000 research articles on it have appeared in the open literature, and many industrial projects use the SOM as a tool for solving hard real world problems. Many fields of science have adopted the SOM as a standard analytical tool: statistics, signal processing, control theory, financial analyses, experimental physics, chemistry and medicine. This new edition includes a survey of over 2000 contemporary studies to cover the newest results. Case examples are provided with detailed formulae, illustrations, and tables. Further, a new chapter on software tools for SOM has been included whilst other chapters have been extended and reorganised.

The book collects the scientific contributions presented at the 10th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (WSOM 2014) held at the University of Applied Sciences Mittweida, Mittweida (Germany, Saxony), on July 2–4, 2014. Starting with the first WSOM-workshop 1997 in Helsinki this workshop focuses on newest results in the field of supervised and unsupervised vector quantization like self-organizing maps for data mining and data classification. This 10th WSOM brought together more than 50 researchers, experts and practitioners in the beautiful small town Mittweida in Saxony (Germany) nearby the mountains Erzgebirge to discuss new developments in the field of unsupervised self-organizing vector quantization systems and learning vector quantization approaches for classification. The book contains the accepted papers of the workshop after a careful review process as well as summaries of the invited talks. Among these book chapters there are excellent examples of the use of self-organizing maps in agriculture, computer science, data visualization, health systems, economics, engineering, social sciences, text and image analysis and time series analysis. Other chapters present the latest theoretical work on self-organizing maps as well as learning vector quantization methods, such as relating those methods to classical statistical decision methods. All the contribution demonstrate that vector quantization methods cover a large range of application areas including data visualization of high-dimensional complex data, advanced decision making and classification or data clustering and data compression.

This state-of-the-art survey offers a renewed and refreshing focus on the progress in nature-inspired and linguistically motivated computation. The book presents the expertise and experiences of leading researchers spanning a diverse spectrum of computational intelligence in the areas of neurocomputing, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, and adjacent areas. The result is a balanced contribution to the field of computational intelligence that should serve the community not only as a survey and a reference, but also as an inspiration for the future advancement of the state of the art of the field. The 18 selected chapters originate from lectures and presentations given at the 5th IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, WCCI 2008, held in Hong Kong, China, in June 2008. After an introduction to the field and an overview of the volume, the chapters are divided into four topical sections on machine learning and brain computer interface, fuzzy modeling and control, computational evolution, and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, IWANN 2007, held in San Sebastián, Spain in June 2007. Coverage includes theoretical concepts and neurocomputational formulations, evolutionary and genetic algorithms, data analysis, signal processing, robotics and planning motor control, as well as neural networks and other machine learning methods in cancer research.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the sixth International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks - ICANN 96, held in Bochum, Germany in July 1996. The 145 papers included were carefully selected from numerous submissions on the basis of at least three reviews; also included are abstracts of the six invited plenary talks. All in all, the set of papers presented reflects the state of the art in the field of ANNs. Among the topics and areas covered are a broad spectrum of theoretical aspects, applications in various fields, sensory processing, cognitive science and AI, implementations, and neurobiology.

The Encyclopedia of the Neuroscience explores all areas of the discipline in its focused entries on a wide variety of topics in neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry and other related areas of neuroscience. Each article is written by an expert in that specific domain and peer reviewed by the advisory board before acceptance into the encyclopedia. Each article contains a glossary, introduction, a reference section, and cross-references to other related encyclopedia articles. Written at a level suitable for university undergraduates, the breadth and depth of coverage will appeal beyond undergraduates to professionals and academics in related fields.