About 8 per cent of the human
genome consists of human endogenous retroviral sequences (HERVs),
which are remains from ancient infections. The HERVs may give rise to
transcripts or affect the expression of human genes. The first step in
understanding HERV function is to classify HERVs into families. In
this work we study the relationships of existing HERV families and
detect potentially new HERV families. A Median Self-Organizing Map
(SOM), a SOM for non-vectorial data, is used to group and visualize a
collection of 3661 HERVs. The SOM-based analysis is complemented with
estimates of the reliability of the results. A novel trustworthiness
visualization method is used to estimate which parts of the SOM
visualization are reliable and which not. The reliability of extracted
interesting HERV groups is verified by a bootstrap procedure suitable
for SOM visualization-based analysis. The SOM detects a group of
epsilonretroviral sequences and a group of ERV9, HERVW, and HUERSP3
sequences which suggests that ERV9 and HERVW sequences may have a
common origin.