The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is one of the most frequently used architectures for unsupervised artificial neural networks. Introduced by Teuvo Kohonen in the 1980s, SOMs have been developed as a very powerful method for visualization and unsupervised classification tasks by an active and innovative community of interna tional researchers. A number of extensions and modifications have been developed during the last two decades. The reason is surely not that the original algorithm was imperfect or inad equate. It is rather the universal applicability and easy handling of the SOM. Com pared to many other network paradigms, only a few parameters need to be arranged and thus also for a beginner the network leads to useful and reliable results. Never theless there is scope for improvements and sophisticated new developments as this book impressively demonstrates. The number of published applications utilizing the SOM appears to be unending. As the title of this book indicates, the reader will benefit from some of the latest the oretical developments and will become acquainted with a number of challenging real-world applications. Our aim in producing this book has been to provide an up to-date treatment of the field of self-organizing neural networks, which will be ac cessible to researchers, practitioners and graduated students from diverse disciplines in academics and industry. We are very grateful to the father of the SOMs, Professor Teuvo Kohonen for sup porting this book and contributing the first chapter.

Pattern Recognition by Self-Organizing Neural Networks presentsthe most recent advances in an area of research that is becoming vitally important in the fields ofcognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and neural networks in general. The 19articles take up developments in competitive learning and computational maps, adaptive resonancetheory, and specialized architectures and biological connections. Introductorysurvey articles provide a framework for understanding the many models involved in various approachesto studying neural networks. These are followed in Part 2 by articles that form the foundation formodels of competitive learning and computational mapping, and recent articles by Kohonen, applyingthem to problems in speech recognition, and by Hecht-Nielsen, applying them to problems in designingadaptive lookup tables. Articles in Part 3 focus on adaptive resonance theory (ART) networks,selforganizing pattern recognition systems whose top-down template feedback signals guarantee theirstable learning in response to arbitrary sequences of input patterns. In Part 4, articles describeembedding ART modules into larger architectures and provide experimental evidence fromneurophysiology, event-related potentials, and psychology that support the prediction that ARTmechanisms exist in the brain. Contributors: J.-P. Banquet, G.A. Carpenter, S.Grossberg, R. Hecht-Nielsen, T. Kohonen, B. Kosko, T.W. Ryan, N.A. Schmajuk, W. Singer, D. Stork, C.von der Malsburg, C.L. Winter.

For the first time, this book sets forth the concept and model for a process neural network. You’ll discover how a process neural network expands the mapping relationship between the input and output of traditional neural networks and greatly enhances the expression capability of artificial neural networks. Detailed illustrations help you visualize information processing flow and the mapping relationship between inputs and outputs.

This invaluable book is the first of its kind on 'selforganizology', the science of self-organization. It covers a wide range of topics, such as the theory, principle and methodology of selforganizology, agent-based modelling, intelligence basis, ant colony optimization, fish/particle swarm optimization, cellular automata, spatial diffusion models, evolutionary algorithms, self-adaptation and control systems, self-organizing neural networks, catastrophe theory and methods, and self-organization of biological communities, etc.Readers will have an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of selforganizology, with detailed background information provided for those who wish to delve deeper into the subject and explore research literature.This book is a valuable reference for research scientists, university teachers, graduate students and high-level undergraduates in the areas of computational science, artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, engineering science, social science and life sciences.

This two volume set LNCS 5163 and LNCS 5164 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2008, held in Prague Czech Republic, in September 2008. The 200 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 300 submissions. The first volume contains papers on mathematical theory of neurocomputing, learning algorithms, kernel methods, statistical learning and ensemble techniques, support vector machines, reinforcement learning, evolutionary computing, hybrid systems, self-organization, control and robotics, signal and time series processing and image processing.

Due to the complexity and non-linearity of most ecological problems, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have attracted attention from ecologists and environmental scientists in recent years. As these networks are increasingly being used in ecology for modeling, simulation, function approximation, prediction, classification and data mining, this unique and self-contained book will be the first comprehensive treatment of this subject, by providing readers with overall and in-depth knowledge on algorithms, programs, and applications of ANNs in ecology. Moreover, a new area of ecology, i.e., computational ecology, is proposed and its scopes and objectives are defined and discussed.Computational Ecology consists of two parts: the first describes the methods and algorithms of ANNs, interpretability and mathematical generalization of neural networks, Matlab neural network toolkit, etc., while the second provides case studies of applications of ANNs in ecology, Matlab codes, and comparisons of ANNs with conventional methods. This publication will be a valuable reference for research scientists, university teachers, graduate students and high-level undergraduates in the areas of ecology, environmental sciences, and computational science.

This book provides the first accessible introduction to neural network analysis as a methodological strategy for social scientists. The author details numerous studies and examples which illustrate the advantages of neural network analysis over other quantitative and modelling methods in widespread use. Methods are presented in an accessible style for readers who do not have a background in computer science. The book provides a history of neural network methods, a substantial review of the literature, detailed applications, coverage of the most common alternative models and examples of two leading software packages for neural network analysis.

This two volume set provides the complete proceedings of the 1990 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks held in Washington, D.C. Complete with subject, author, and title indices, it provides an invaluable reference to the current state-of-the-art in neural networks. Included in this volume are the latest research results, applications, and products from over 2,000 researchers and application developers from around the world. Ideal as a reference for researchers and practitioners of neuroscience, the two volumes are divided into eight sections: * Neural and Cognitive Sciences * Pattern Recognition and Analysis of Network Dynamics * Learning Theory * Plenary Lecture by Bernard Widrow * Special Lectures on Self-Organizing Neural Architectures * Application Systems and Network Implementations * Robotics, Speech, Signal Processing, and Vision * Expert Systems and Other Real-World Applications