Recently, self-organizing maps [15] have been proposed as an alternative visualization method for codon usage data [2,16,17]. Although this method provides a simultaneous clustering of the data which may be useful in certain contexts, it requires to choose the size of a discrete grid on which the genes are mapped in a non-linear way. The grid-size is a critical parameter of the method and directly controls the final clustering in the visualization. Unfortunately, the grid-size of self-organizing maps is a so-called hyperparameter which usually cannot be inferred from the data in an unsupervised manner. Therefore the resulting visualizations bare the risk of being highly subjective.