Juha Vesanto

Contact

• Email: Juha.Vesanto@hut.fi
• Phone: +358-40-7505515

Research

From 1997 to 2002 I was a reseacher and graduate student in
Intelligent Data Engineering group in
Laboratory of Computer and Information Science at
Helsinki University of Technology. I got the doctoral degree (Doctor of Science (Technology)) in June 2002. Currently I work as a data engineer at Xtract.

The theme of my research was the use of Self-Organizing Map (SOM) in data mining and knowledge discovery from databases. It is my belief that the SOM would be a valuable tool in the data understanding / data survey phase of the data mining process, because it is an efficient tool in data segmentation and visualization. However, what was lacking was a set of good postprocessing tools. The tools would allow the data miner to basically throw the data set in a SOM and as an output get a characterization of the data in the form of summarizations and visualizations, aiming to create a better understanding of the data. This is a task which is done over and over again in the course of data mining. Therefore, the constuction of the characterization should be as automated as possible. I handled and partially solved these problems in my research.

Here are some projects I have done / participated in:

Thesis:
• My doctoral thesis: Data exploration process based on the SOM
• My licentiate thesis: Using SOM in data mining
• My master's thesis: Data mining techniques based on the SOM

Selected papers:
• An Automated Report Generation Tool for the Data Understanding Phase in HIS'01.
• Clustering of the Self-Organizing Map in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, special issue on data mining, 2000.
• SOM-Based Data Visualization Methods in Intelligent Data Analysis journal, 1999. Unfortunately some of the references were missing from the paper: here's an Errata .
• Self-Organizing Map in Matlab: the SOM Toolbox in Matlab DSP-conference, 1999.
• Analysis and Modeling of Complex Systems Using the Self-Organizing Map , a chapter in Neuro-Fuzzy Techniques for Intelligent Information Systems, Physica Verlag (Springer Verlag), 1999.

Others:
• Puoluekartta uusiksi
• SOM Toolbox - a SOM package for Matlab 5 (still continuing!)
• Nenet - a SOM training and visualization tool for Windows 95
• SOM in VRML

Bookmarks

Research sites:
• KD Mine
• Neural Network FAQ
• Data Mining Group at the University of Helsinki
• CRISP-DM

Publishers and journals:
• CRC Press
• Springer
• Kluwer Academic Publishers
• IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks
• Intelligent data analysis
• Knowledge and Information Systems
• Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
• Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering

Wanna know about my other, darker side?? Check out my Mr. Hyde page!