Probabilistic self-organizing maps for qualitative data

  • Authors:
  • Ezequiel López-Rubio

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • Neural Networks
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present a self-organizing map model to study qualitative data (also called categorical data). It is based on a probabilistic framework which does not assume any prespecified distribution of the input data. Stochastic approximation theory is used to develop a learning rule that builds an approximation of a discrete distribution on each unit. This way, the internal structure of the input dataset and the correlations between components are revealed without the need of a distance measure among the input values. Experimental results show the capabilities of the model in visualization and unsupervised learning tasks.