A Unified View on Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) and Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (SNE)

We propose a unified view on two widely used data visualization techniques: Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) and Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (SNE). We show that they can both be derived from a common mathematical framework. Leveraging this formulation, we propose to compare SOM and SNE quantitatively on two datasets, and discuss possible avenues for future work to take advantage of both approaches.