A Comparison Study: Clustering using Self-Organizing Map and K-means Algorithm

Abstract

Nowadays clustering is applied in many different scopes of study. There are many methods that have been proposed, but the most widely used is K-means algorithm. Neural network has been also usedin clustering case, and the most popular neural network method for clustering is Self-Organizing Map (SOM). Both methods recently become the most popular and powerful one. Many scholarstry to employ and compare the performance of both mehods. Many papers have been proposed to reveal which one is outperform the other. However, until now there is no exact solution. Different scholar gives different conclusion. In this study, SOM and K-means are compared using three popular data set. Percent misclassified and output visualization graphs (separately and simultaneously with PCA) are presented to verify the comparison result.