Exploratory Data Analysis by the Self-Organizing Map: Structures of Welfare and Poverty in the World

摘要

The self-organizing ap (SOM) is a method that represents statistical data sets in an ordered fashion, as a natural groundwork on which the distributions of the individual indicators in the set can be displayed and analyzed. As a case study that instructs how to use the SOM to compare states of economic systems, the standard of lving of different countries is analyzed using the SOM, Based on a great number (39) of welfare indicators the SOM illustrates rather refined relationshops between the countries two-dimensionally. This method is directly applicable to the financial grading of companies, too.