Modular network self-organizing map: Can it be an artificial cortex?

This paper reports on novel developments brought by combining the self-organizing map (SOM) with a modular network. This is called modular network SOM (mnSOM). The mnSOM has an arrayed structure of functional modules aligned on a lattice, and the architecture looks similar to the column structure of our cortex. One of the advantages of the mnSOM is that the user can design the module architecture flexibly depending on the user's purpose, while the backbone algorithm of SOM is kept untouched. This advantage of mnSOM has brought us many variations and applications. In this paper, the concept of mnSOM is first introduced, and variations of mnSOM and their applications are overviewed.