Self- and Super-organizing Maps in R: The kohonen Package

Abstract

In this age of ever-increasing data set sizes, especially in the natural sciences, visualisation becomes more and more important. Self-organizing maps have many features that make them attractive in this respect: they do not rely on distributional assumptions, can handle huge data sets with ease, and have shown their worth in a large number of applications. In this paper, we highlight the kohonen package for R, which implements self-organizing maps as well as some extensions for supervised pattern recognition and data fusion.