Clustering a medieval social network by SOM using a kernel based distance measure

摘要

In order to explore the social organization of a medieval peasant community before the Hundred Years' War, we propose the use of an adaptation of the well-known Kohonen Self Organizing Map to dissimilarity data. In this paper, the algorithm is used with a distance based on a kernel which allows the choice of a smoothing parameter to control the importance of local or global proximities.