Self-Organising Maps for Customer Segmentation using R

Self-Organising Maps (SOMs) are an unsupervised data visualisation technique that can be used to visualise high-dimensional data sets in lower (typically 2) dimensional representations. In this post, we examine the use of R to create a SOM for customer segmentation. The figures shown here used use the 2011 Irish Census information for the greater Dublin area as an example data set. This work is based on a talk given to the Dublin R Users group in January 2014. SOMs were first described by Teuvo Kohonen in Finland in 1982, and Kohonen's work in this space has made him the most cited Finnish scientist in the world.