Measures for the Organization of Self-Organizing Maps

Abstract

The "self-organizing" dynamics of Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) is a prominent property of the model that is intuitively very accessible. Nevertheless, a rigorous definition of a measure for the state of organization of a SOM that is also natural, captures the intuitive properties of organization and proves to be useful in practice, is quite difficult to formulate. The goal of this chapter is to give an overview over the relevant problems in and different approaches towards the development of organization measures for SOMs.