# Examples on kohonen self organizing maps

Is there a simple example to start with for using kohonen 1.1.2 or is it only the test file that will be the reference?

There are alternative solutions for self organizing maps.

Best of them I found pymvpa where the example is easy to read and understand. It is also maintained quite activately as you can see from their Github.

I tried to run the kohonen 1.1.2 test file, but it did not run after two days of trying. So, let's have a try for the another solution.

To run pyMVPA example som.py, you have to do the following (at least):

1 install some pre-requisites: at least numpy, scipy, nibabel and swig to be able to run setup.py
2 run the commands:
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
3 modify example under doc/examples (som.py) to have
import matplotlib.pyplot as pl
4 run command:
python som.py


Note that this works only in python 2, not python3 can be used as command.

• I am not able to build it on my system. It keeps on failing due to Android SDK errors! – user 923227 Apr 9 '18 at 23:23
• Well, errors tell what is missing. You will need to install them manually. – mico Apr 10 '18 at 3:55
• :) Sure! I had to run step 2 as sudo.  python setup.py build python setup.py install and then as you said python 3 it was not working - so one of the installs I had to do python -m pip install <package> for Python 2 explicitly. Thanks for the motivation! – user 923227 Apr 10 '18 at 22:45