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

The self organizing map 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 living of dif ferent countries is analyzed using the SOM Based on a great number of welfare indicators the SOM illustrates rather re ned relation ships between the countries two dimensionally This method is directly applicable to the nancial grading of companies too