Potential support vector machines for phytoplankton fluorescence spectra classification: comparison with self-organizing maps.

Evaluation of phytoplankton communities is an important task to characterize marine environments. Fluorescence spectroscopy is a powerful technique usually used for this goal. This study presents a comparison between two different techniques for fast phytoplankton discrimination: Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) and Potential Support Vector Machines (P-SVM), evaluating its capability to achieve phytoplankton classification from its fluorescence spectra.