Researchers and data analysts are increasingly relying on graphical tools to assist them in modeling their data, generating their hypotheses, and gaining deeper insights on their experimentally acquired data. Recent advances in technology have made available more improved and novel modeling and analysis media that facilitate intuitive, task-driven exploratory analysis and manipulation of the displayed graphical representations. In order to utilize these emerging technologies researchers must be able to transform experimentally acquired data vectors into a visual form or secondary representation that has a simple structure and, is easily transferable into the media. As well, it is essential that it can be modified or manipulated within the display environment. This thesis presents a data-driven modeling technique that utilizes the basic learning strategy of an unsupervised clustering algorithm, called the self-organizing feature map, to adaptively learn topological associations inherent in the data and preserve them within the topology imposed by its predefined spherical lattice, thereby transforming the data into a 3D tessellated form. The tessellated graphical forms originate from a sphere thereby simplifying the process of computing its transformation parameters on re-orientation within an interactive, task-driven, graphical display medium. A variety of data sets including six sets of scattered 3D coordinate data, chaotic attractor data, the more commonly used Fisher s Iris flower data, medical numeric data, geographic and environmental data are used to illustrate the data-driven modeling and visualization mechanism. The modeling algorithm is first applied to scattered 3D coordinate data to understand the influence of the spherical topology on data organization. Two cases are examined, one in which the integrity of the spherical lattice is maintained during learning and, the second, in which the inter-node connections in the spherical lattice are adaptively changed during learning. In the analysis, scattered coordinate data of freeform objects with topology equivalent to a sphere and those whose topology is not equivalent to a sphere are used. Experiments demonstrate that it is possible to get reasonably good results with the degree of resemblance, determined by an average of the total normalized error measure, ranging from 6.2x10-5 1.1x10-3. The experimental analysis using scattered coordinate data facilitates an understanding of the algorithm and provides evidence of the topology-preserving capability of the spherical self-organizing feature map. The algorithm is later implemented using abstract, seemingly random, numeric data. Unlike in the case of 3D coordinate data, wherein the SOFM lattice is in the same coordinate frame (domain) as the input vectors, the numeric data is abstract. The criterion for deforming the spherical lattice is determined using mathematical and statistical functions as measures-of information that are tailored to reflect some aspect of meaningful, tangible, inter-vector relationships or associations embedded in the spatial data that reveal some physical aspect of the data. These measures are largely application-dependent and need to be defined by the data analyst or an expert. Interpretation of the resulting 3D tessellated graphical representation or form (glyph) is more complex and task dependent as compared to that of scattered coordinate data. Very simple measures are used in this analysis in order to facilitate discussion of the underlying mechanism to transform abstract numeric data into 3D graphical forms or glyphs. Several data sets are used in the analysis to illustrate how novel characteristics hidden in the data, and not easily apparent in the string of numbers, can be reflected via 3D graphical forms. The proposed data-driven modeling approach provides a viable mechanism to generate 3D tessellated representations of data that can be easily transferred to a graphical modeling and ana

The self-organizing map, first described by the Finnish scientist Teuvo Kohonen, can by applied to a wide range of fields. This book is about such applications, i.e. how the original self-organizing map as well as variants and extensions of it can be applied in different fields. In fourteen chapters, a wide range of such applications is discussed. To name a few, these applications include the analysis of financial stability, the fault diagnosis of plants, the creation of well-composed heterogeneous teams and the application of the self-organizing map to the atmospheric sciences.

Self-organizing maps (SOMs) were developed by Teuvo Kohonen in the early eighties. Since then more than 10,000 works have been based on SOMs. SOMs are unsupervised neural networks useful for clustering and visualization purposes. Many SOM applications have been developed in engineering and science, and other fields. This book contains refereed papers presented at the 9th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (WSOM 2012) held at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, on December 12-14, 2012. The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners in the field of self-organizing systems. Among the book chapters there are excellent examples of the use of SOMs in agriculture, computer science, data visualization, health systems, economics, engineering, social sciences, text and image analysis, and time series analysis. Other chapters present the latest theoretical work on SOMs as well as Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) methods.

Archaeology studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis and interpretation of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artefacts, features, biofacts, and landscapes. Because archaeology's aim is to understand mankind, it is a humanistic endeavour. The goals of archaeology vary, and there is debate as to what its aims and responsibilities are. Some goals include the documentation and explanation of the origins and development of human cultures, understanding culture history, chronicling cultural evolution, and studying human behaviour and ecology, for both prehistoric and historic societies. This advanced book presents important research in the field.

Geoarchaeology is the field of study that applies the concepts and methods of the geosciences to archaeological research. Geoarchaeological studies are important to archaeology because they can significantly enhance the archaeological interpretation. This book presents a geoarchaeological investigation of the processes involved in the formation of the Neolithic site at Paliambela in the Northern Pieria region of Central Macedonia, Northern Greece which unusually comprises both a tell and flat/extended component. Evidence (i.e., pits) of the Byzantine-Ottoman period was also detected on the tell part of the Neolithic site. The book presents and interprets the results of geoarchaeological analysis of core-data and of selected deposits (pits and ditches of the Neolithic period and pits of the Byzantine-Ottoman period, for comparative purposes) within the site. It also explores the spatial organisation of these deposits in more detail applying non-linear and linear methods of statistical analysis on the smallest cultural indicators (i.e., microartIfacts) detected on these archaeological deposits. The overall outcome of this analysis is the recognition that the formation of the archaeological deposits from both parts of the site, both temporally and spatially, was largely the result of differences in human activities and probably in the organisation of human activities that seem to preserve the two components of the Neolithic site as spatially distinct over time while differences between the Neolithic and the Byzantine-Ottoman contexts broadly indicate differences in the living environment between the prehistoric and the historic settlement.