Analysis and Modeling of Complex Systems

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a powerful neural network for analysis and visualization of high-dimensional data. It maps nonlinear statistical relationships between high-dimensional input data into simple geometric relationships on a usually two-dimensional grid. The mapping roughly preserves the most important topological and metric relationships of the original data elements and, thus, inherently clusters the data. The need for eecient data visualization and clustering is often faced in various engineering problems. In this chapter, SOM based methods are applied in analysis, monitoring and modeling of complex systems.