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I am trying to perform test summarize using self organizing map (SOM) as the clustering model. Do we have any libraries for performing SOM in python.

Koteswara
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  • Please try googling and testing for yourself first, before asking questions here. https://www.google.nl/search?q=python%20self%20organizing%20maps – Peter Smit Nov 29 '16 at 11:43
  • @PeterSmit, the question is off-topic for sure, but you are wrong too. You don't get to 6K views by using SO's search only. Even if the OP did not ask the question in the right location / way, this page has become somewhat of a gateway for people "googling" in the future. – scottlittle Sep 01 '19 at 21:45

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There is one here, but in general SOM implementations are not part of the main machine learning libraries. There are two reasons

  • SOM's, although nice to look at, don't really perform well in real problems.
  • It is too easy to construct one by yourself.

I would suggest to make it yourself. It is very easy and a great way to introduce yourself to python. The main code of the SOM itself is about 3 lines (a loop and one update). The remaing of the code would be for loading the data and plotting them, but you won't avoid that part of the code by using an external library

blue_note
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    I believe SOM performs really very well in real world. It was used in stock trading with success. But, real world implementation has probably more lines than 3 I would say. – dev1223 Oct 15 '18 at 20:45
  • @Seraph: the main algorithm is just an updating loop. Maybe 30 lines instead of 3. "real world" would probably mean reading/adapting your data, talking to external services, etc. But using a library won't provide that, you still have to write it yourself. – blue_note Oct 16 '18 at 09:49
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    Yeah. Actually, SOM is kinda complex If you want to do it right, there are papers about using SOM for intrusion prevention systems, stock trading and even image recognition. SOM is old concept, but when done right, I believe, its one of best unsupervised algorithms in the world. If you know some better one, let me know, I will add it to my watchlist. – dev1223 Nov 01 '18 at 17:11