Project Portfolio Exploration and Visualization using Self-Organizing Maps
Amgad Naiem, Mohammed A. El-Beltagy, Sondos Seif · 2016
When dealing with portfolio analysis and assessment, decision makers often have to select a portfolio of a subset of proposed projects with varying levels of investment. The process involves comparing large sets of project portfolios across many dimensions. A tool that would make such comparisons cognizable would greatly facilitate portfolio selection. We tackle this challenge by visualizing the set of candidate portfolios using a self-organizing map (SOM). We adopt and modify the matching and updating steps of the SOM to work with project portfolio data. Our approach is based on content aware distance calculation between the data and codebook vectors as well as a novel process of updating the codebooks when dealing with project portfolio data.