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.
