  This paper adopts and adapts Kohonen's standard Self-Organizing Map (SOM) for
exploratory temporal structure analysis. The Self-Organizing Time Map (SOTM)
implements SOM-type learning to one-dimensional arrays for individual time
units, preserves the orientation with short-term memory and arranges the arrays
in an ascending order of time. The two-dimensional representation of the SOTM
attempts thus twofold topology preservation, where the horizontal direction
preserves time topology and the vertical direction data topology. This enables
discovering the occurrence and exploring the properties of temporal structural
changes in data. For representing qualities and properties of SOTMs, we adapt
measures and visualizations from the standard SOM paradigm, as well as
introduce a measure of temporal structural changes. The functioning of the
SOTM, and its visualizations and quality and property measures, are illustrated
on artificial toy data. The usefulness of the SOTM in a real-world setting is
shown on poverty, welfare and development indicators.
