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.

Solution 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.

Solution 2

Shane already mentioned the kohonen package. An introduction and tutorial can be found in the Journal of Statistical Software: Self- and Super-organizing Maps in R: The kohonen Package

Comments

[rcs]

Just for completeness, batchSOM in class package (part of the Venables & Ripley package bundle)

[Btibert3]

I did, but looking at the documentation with a few lines of code and no context is a little tough.

[Btibert3]

I saw this too, and it is the closest that I have found to being a good tutorial. Maybe it is wishful thinking, but I am hoping I can find a tutorial that is geared towards someone being introduced to the technique as well as how to perform the task in R, step-by-step.