Abstract
The self-organizing map is a statistical data analysis method of the branch of unsupervised learning, whose goal is to determine the properties of input data without explicit feedback from a teacher. Originally inspired by feature maps in sensory systems, it has greatly contributed to our understanding of self-organization in the brain in general and the development of feature maps in particular. Through interplay of lateral inhibition and Hebbian learning within a localized region of a one-layered neural network, the network acquires a low-dimensional representation of high-dimensional input features, which respects topological relationships of the input space.