Self-Organizing Maps

The book we have at hand is the fourth monograph I wrote for Springer- Verlag. The previous one named 'Self-Organization and Associative Mem- ory' (Springer Series in Information Sciences, Volume 8) came out in 1984. Since then the self-organizing neural-network algorithms called SOM and LVQ have become very popular, as can be seen from the many works re- viewed in Chap. 9. The new results obtained in the past ten years or so have warranted a new monograph. Over these years I have also answered lots of questions; they have influenced the contents of the present book. I hope it would be of some interest and help to the readers if I now first very briefly describe the various phases that led to my present SOM research, and the reasons underlying each new step. I became interested in neural networks around 1960, but could not in- terrupt my graduate studies in physics. After I was appointed Professor of Electronics in 1965, it still took some years to organize teaching at the uni- versity. In 1968 - 69 I was on leave at the University of Washington, and D. Gabor had just published his convolution-correlation model of autoasso- ciative memory. I noticed immediately that there was something not quite right about it: the capacity was very poor and the inherent noise and crosstalk were intolerable. In 1970 I therefore sugge~ted the auto associative correlation matrix memory model, at the same time as J.A. Anderson and K. Nakano.