Expanding self-organizing map for data visualization and cluster analysis

  • Authors:
  • Huidong Jin;Wing-Ho Shum;Kwong-Sak Leung;Man-Leung Wong

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese Unversity of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese Unversity of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese Unversity of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong;Department of Information Systems, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • Information Sciences: an International Journal - Special issue: Soft computing data mining
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a powerful tool in the exploratory phase of data mining. It is capable of projecting high-dimensional data onto a regular, usually 2- dimensional grid of neurons with good neighborhood preservation between two spaces. However, due to the dimensional conflict, the neighborhood preservation cannot always lead to perfect topology preservation. In this paper, we establish an Expanding SOM (ESOM) to preserve better topology between the two spaces. Besides the neighborhood relationship, our ESOM can detect and preserve an ordering relationship using an expanding mechanism. The computational complexity of the ESOM is comparable with that of the SOM. Our experiment results demonstrate that the ESOM constructs better mappings than the classic SOM, especially, in terms of the topological error. Furthermore, clustering results generated by the ESOM are more accurate than those obtained by the SOM.