A self-organizing map (SOM), sometimes known as a Kohonen map after its originator the Finnish professor Teuvo Kohonen, is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional representation of a higher dimensional data set. SOMs are a specific type of artificial neural network, but use a different training strategy compared to more traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). SOMs can be used for clustering, dimensionality reduction, feature extraction, and classification — all of which suggest that they can be important tools for understanding large Earth Systems Science (ESS) datasets.
Machine Learning systems are often configured around Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) rather than Central Processing Units (CPUs). Why should this be the case, in an era when CPUs are powerful and (relatively) inexpensive? This article provides some insights into what GPUs are and why they provide advantages for certain types of computations, including some commonly used for machine learning and modeling.
