Kohonen SOM Maps in R Tutorial

Question

I am simply looking for a good tutorial that will walk me through how to create a SOM in R. I am reading Kohonen and Kaski's paper on using the maps to identify the structure of Welfare, and want to try the technique my self.

I think many of the examples in R have a lot to be desired. I have looked on the web and didn't find anything that I thought made the process easy to understand.

Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

A few pointers:

• SOM package
• Kohonen package

Most of the SOM related packages are from the Chemometrics and Computational Physics area, but you also have a look at the cluster view on CRAN.

Edit: Incidentally, I'm not aware of any tutorials, but one good way to find examples is to google with ext:r. There are several "som" scripts that show up that way, including this example which shows how to use it with GGobi.