A new approach to hierarchical clustering and structuring of data with Self-Organizing Maps

  • Authors:
  • Elias Pampalk;Gerhard Widmer;Alvin Chan

  • Affiliations:
  • (Corresponding author: Tel.: +43 1 5336112 21/ Fax: +43 1 533611277) Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI), Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: {elias, gerha ...;Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI), Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Vienna, Austria and Department of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, University of Vienna, Au ...;DSO National Laboratories, 20 Science Park Drive, Singapore 118230. E-mail: ctuckwai@dso.org.sg

  • Venue:
  • Intelligent Data Analysis
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a powerful tool for exploratory data analysis which has been employed in a wide range of data mining applications. We present a novel approach to reveal the inherent hierarchical structure of data using multiple SOMs together with heuristics which optimize the stability. In particular, we address shortcomings of the Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map (GHSOM) regarding the decision which areas in the hierarchical structure need to be represented by a finer granularity and which areas do not. We introduce the Tension and Mapping Ratio extension to exploit specific characteristics of the SOM based on the topology preservation. As a main result, in contrast to the GHSOM, the inherent hierarchical structure of the data is revealed without requiring the user to define a threshold parameter which controls the map sizes of the individual SOMs. We evaluate our approach using data from real-world data mining projects in the music domain.