A self-organizing map (SOM), sometimes known as a Kohonen map after its originator the Finnish professor Teuvo Kohonen, is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional representation of a higher dimensional data set. SOMs are a specific type of artificial neural network, but use a different training strategy compared to more traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). SOMs can be used for clustering, dimensionality reduction, feature extraction, and classification — all of which suggest that they can be important tools for understanding large Earth Systems Science (ESS) datasets.
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