ELM-SOM: A Continuous Self-Organizing Map for Visualization

This paper presents a novel dimensionality reduction technique: ELM-SOM. This technique preserves the intrinsic quality of Self-Organizing Maps (SOM): it is nonlinear and suitable for big data. It also brings continuity to the projection using two Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) models, the first one to perform the dimensionality reduction and the second one to perform the reconstruction. ELM-SOM is tested successfully on six diverse datasets. Regarding reconstruction error, ELM-SOM is comparable to SOM while bringing continuity.