Applications of Different Self‐Organizing Map Variants to Geographical Information Science Problems

In this chapter, an overview of different variants of the original Self-Organizing Map algorithm is presented, with an emphasis on those that can integrate spatial reasoning or otherwise be applied in the context of Geographic Information Science. A few of the most relevant variants are discussed, together with a recently developed variant proposed by the authors. An example of the application of some SOM variants to an artificial dataset is presented, and their main advantages pointed out. Finally, these variants are used to solve a real world problem, and conclusions and recommendations for future work are given.