EnvSOM: a SOM algorithm conditioned on the environment for clustering and visualization

  • Authors:
  • Serafín Alonso;Mika Sulkava;Miguel Angel Prada;Manuel Domínguez;Jaakko Hollmén

  • Affiliations:
  • Grupo de Investigación SUPPRESS, Universidad de León, León, Spain;Department of Information and Computer Science, Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, Finland;Department of Information and Computer Science, Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, Finland;-;-

  • Venue:
  • WSOM'11 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Advances in self-organizing maps
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a new approach suitable for analysis of large data sets, conditioned on the environment. Mainly, the envSOM algorithm consists of two consecutive trainings of the self-organizing map. In the first phase, a SOM is trained using every available variable, but only those which characterize the environment are used to compute the winner unit. Therefore, this phase produces an accurate model of the environment. In the second phase, a new SOM is initialized appropriately with information from the codebooks of the first SOM. The new SOM uses all the variables for winner selection. However, in this case the environmental variables are kept fixed and only the remaining ones are involved in the update process. A model of the whole data set influenced by the environmental conditions is obtained in this second phase. The result of this algorithm represents a probability function of a data set, given the environment information. Therefore, it could be very useful in the analysis of processes which have close dependencies on environmental conditions.