Interactive Interpretation of Kohonen Maps Applied to Curves

For large customers, Electricite de France - the French national electric power company - stores every 10' the amount of electric power they consume. For each customer, these measures lead to curves called electric load curves. Clustering of electric load curves is a key problem for understanding the behavior of these customers. Several methods have been used but Kohonen maps give a very nice solution to this problem thanks to the visualization of the map. The work we present here describes a software for interactive construction and interpretation of a Kohonen map clustering, in the case of curves. The user can run the Kohonen map clustering, visualize the map, see external characteristics of curves linked to each cell of the map, find the cells figuring curves having some chosen external characteristics, define classes of cells, add comments on cells. User interaction is largely based on mouse clicking on the map cells and on bars of barcharts figuring external characteristics of the curves. This software is not dedicated to electric load curve analysis but can be used on any type of curve, for instance to analyze time series in finance.