A SAM-SOM family: incorporating spatial access methods into constructive self-organizing maps

Self-organizing maps (SOM) perform similarity information retrieval, but they cannot answer questions like k-nearest neighbors easily. This paper presents a new family of constructive SOM called SAM-SOM family which incorporates spatial access methods to perform more specific queries like k-NN and range queries. Using this family of networks, the patterns have to be presented only once. This approach speeds up dramatically the SOM training process with a minimal number of parameters.