I'm learning self-organizing maps, however I don't know how to determine the number of nodes by which the data will be well classified. Which metric may be useful?
There is no hard and fast answer to this question. Given N nodes and M data points, if NM, that is, you have an emergent self-organizing map, each data point will have its own neighborhood, and the clustering structure can be read out from the topology of the map.
In either case, you can run a clustering algorithm on the weight vectors to get a class assignment.
we are working on it too. We decided we have to select a node number by ecological sense. We are triying to reduce to the max the number of nodes, in order to simplify our datasets, but we have to take care and not to reduce too much, so we can lose out data variability.