Abstract:
From our viewpoint data analysis is a human controlled process. It is an iterative and interactive task, where the initial guess of data behaviour may have to be changed several times. Thus, the effectiveness of analysis depends on what can be achieved during one iteration, and how long it takes to do it. One part of the analysis is to reduce the amount of information such that its essential elements are maintained, and another is to display its contents in human understandable form. Our solution is to use variants of the self-organising map (SOM) as an analysing method. This is a quantative approach that can be adapted also as a part of a qualitative analysis.