Cluster analysis; Self Organising Map Algorithm

Cluster analysis or clustering is a task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense or another) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). It is the main task of exploratory data mining and a common technique for statistical data analysis used in many fields, including machine learning, pattern recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, and bioinformatics. The topic of this paper is one of the modern methods of clustering namely SOM (Self Organising Map). The paper describes the theory needed to understand the principle of clustering and descriptions of algorithm used with clustering in our experiments.