What Does Self-Organizing Map (SOM) Mean?
A self-organizing map (SOM) is a type of artificial neural network that uses unsupervised learning to build a two-dimensional map of a problem space. The key difference between a self-organizing map and other approaches to problem solving is that a self-organizing map uses competitive learning rather than error-correction learning such as backpropagation with gradient descent.
Techopedia Explains Self-Organizing Map (SOM)
A self-organizing map is a type of artificial neural network that attempts to build a two-dimensional map of some problem space. The problem space can be anything from votes in U.S. Congress, maps of colors and even links between Wikipedia articles.
