Documentation

A note:
Several functions have been added to the package after completing the tutorial (April 2000). The on-line help files are more up-to-date. You can download them from above or browse them here The most up-to-date documentation is found in the help texts of the MATLAB functions themselves. Try, e.g.,

>>help somtoolbox

in MATLAB.

Kindly observe that the members of the SOM Toolbox team have left CIS or are involved with other duties. Therefore, we cannot currently guarantee any support in using SOM Toolbox.

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SOM and SOM Toolbox

• SOM algorithm implementation in SOM Toolbox by Juha Vesanto.

Getting started

• An introduction to SOM Toolbox
• Getting started with SOM Toolbox in practice

SOM Toolbox help texts on-line

• Online Documentation (Aug 11 2003)

SOM Toolbox main reference and tutorial

Technical report on SOM Toolbox 2.0 (April 2000)
PostScript, PDF and zipped: both PS and PDF

System requirements

• Matlab: The SOM Toolbox is built using the MATLAB script language. Since structures and N-dimensional matrices are used, it requires Matlab 5. For SOM Toolbox 1.0, at least Matlab 5.1 is recommended. For SOM Toolbox 2.0, at least Matlab 5.2 is required (although you can get it working in 5.1 if you remove the try - catch commands). The basic SOM Toolbox does not require any other toolboxes to work, just the basic Matlab. However, some of the contributed functions may require for example Statistics Toolbox. There have been some problems when running SOM Toolbox in MATLAB 6.5 (and newer). These problems are corrected time to time.
• Operating system: The Toolbox has been built in unix environment and uses longer than 8+3 filenames. Therefore we cannot guarantee that it works in environments which do not support long filenames, like MS-DOS or Windows 3.1. Also, there are some differences in how the GUIs are implemented in different environments, so they can loose some of their appeal in environments other than Unix. Otherwise, the SOM Toolbox works in any environment where Matlab works.
• Hardware: The training procedures use quite a lot of memory (although not nearly as much as they did in version 1.0), so we recommend at least 64 MB of RAM. The functions take slightly over 1 MB of disk space. The speed of the processor is not an issue. If you run a Matlab in your machine, you can run the SOM Toolbox, too.