Spatio-Temporal Analysis with the Self-Organizing Feature Map

Spatio-temporal pattern recognition problems are particularly challenging. They typically involve detecting change that occurs over time in two-dimensional patterns. Analytic techniques devised for temporal data must take into account the spatial relationships among data points. An artificial neural network known as the self-organizing feature map (SOM) has been used to analyze spatial data. This paper further investigates the use of the SOM with spatio-temporal pattern recognition. The principles of the two-dimensional SOM are developed into a novel three-dimensional network and experiments demonstrate that (i) the three-dimensional network makes a better topological ordering and (ii) there is a difference in terms of the spatio-temporal analysis that can be made with the three-dimensional network.