The Self-Organizing Map (SOM), with its variants, is the most popular artificial neural network algorithm in the unsupervised learning category. About 4000 research articles on it have appeared in the open literature, and many industrial projects use the SOM as a tool for solving hard real world problems. Many fields of science have adopted the SOM as a standard analytical tool: statistics, signal processing, control theory, financial analyses, experimental physics, chemistry and medicine. This new edition includes a survey of over 2000 contemporary studies to cover the newest results. Case...

While the present edition is bibliographically the third one of Vol. 8 of the Springer Series in Information Sciences (IS 8), the book actually stems from Vol. 17 of the series Communication and Cybernetics (CC 17), entitled Associative Memory - A System-Theoretical Approach, which appeared in 1977. That book was the first monograph on distributed associative memories, or "content-addressable memories" as they are frequently called, especially in neural-networks research. This author, however, would like to reserve the term "content-addressable memory" for certain more traditional constructs,...

Due to continual progress in the large-scale integration of semiconductor circuits, parallel computing principles can already be met in low-cost sys tems: numerous examples exist in image processing, for which special hard ware is implementable with quite modest resources even by nonprofessional designers. Principles of content addressing, if thoroughly understood, can thereby be applied effectively using standard components. On the other hand, mass storage based on associative principles still exists only in the long term plans of computer technologists. This situation is somewhat confused...