A VISUALIZATION AND DESIGN TOOL (AVID) FOR DATA MINING WITH THE SELF-ORGANIZING FEATURE MAP
This paper presents a software tool called AVID (A VIsualization and Design) which is particularly useful for data mining with an artificial neural network known as the self-organising feature map (SOM). AVID supports network training in both the i) selection of network inputs and ii) visualisation of the trained SOM. Both these features are novel aids to SOM network training and are particularly important when consideration is given to using the SOM for data mining. Once trained the SOM produces a 2-dimensional topological ordering of the input training data and it is particularly useful for representing the relationships within multi-dimensional data. The main classes within the data can be identified from the output map. AVID is an important software tool which enables data mining with the SOM by the selection of network inputs and the subsequent visualisation of the classes within these input vectors.