Clustering and classification using a self-organizing MAP: The main flaw and the improvement perspectives

The Self-Organizing Neural Network Map (SOM) may be considered as good tools for classification and clustering process. Therefore, their performance is investigated in this work to make out the main flaw and propose the suitable improvements to overpass their limitations. These latter were extracted by the use of the SOM to classify a set of values with two different dimensions, the computational time cost and the input space normalization were the main deficiencies faced in this process. It's to note that the SOM was used without any kind of supervising or pre-training. The proposed improvement to overpass these deficiencies relies on enhancing the normalization mechanism with more intelligent techniques that can reduce the computational time and regularize the input space to avoid these limitations.