XPySom: High-performance self-organizing maps

In this paper, we introduce XPySom, a new open-source Python implementation of the well-known Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) technique. It is designed to achieve high performance on a single node, exploiting widely available Python libraries for vector processing on multi-core CPUs and GP-GPUs. We present results from an extensive experimental evaluation of XPySom in comparison to widely used open-source SOM implementations, showing that it outperforms the other available alternatives. Indeed, our experimentation carried out using the Extended MNIST open data set shows a speed-up of about 7x and 100x when compared to the best open-source multi-core implementations we could find with multi-core and GP-GPU acceleration, respectively, achieving the same accuracy levels in terms of quantization error.