MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES - LASA

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6.8 The Self-Organizing Map (SOM)
The SOM is an algorithm used to visualize and interpret large high-dimensional data sets. Typical
applications are visualization of process states or financial results by representing the central
dependencies within the data on the map. It is a way of reducing the dimensionality of a dataset,
by producing a map of usually 1 or 2 dimensions, which plot the similarities of the data by
grouping similar data items together.
The map consists of a regular grid of processing units, "neurons". A model of some
multidimensional observation, eventually a vector consisting of features, is associated with each
unit. The map attempts to represent all the available observations with optimal accuracy using a
restricted set of models. At the same time the models become ordered on the grid so that similar
models are close to each other and dissimilar models far from each other.
6.8.1 Kohonen Network
Kohonen's SOM is called a topology-preserving map because there is a topological structure
imposed on the nodes in the network. A topological map is simply a mapping that preserves
neighborhood relations.
In the networks we have considered so far, we have ignored the geometrical arrangements of
output nodes. Each node in a given layer has been identical in that each is connected with all of
the nodes in the upper and/or lower layer. We are now going to take into consideration that
physical arrangement of these nodes. Nodes that are "close" together are going to interact
differently than nodes that are "far" apart.
What do we mean by "close" and "far"? We can think of organizing the output nodes in a line or in
a planar configuration.
The goal is to train the net so that nearby outputs correspond to nearby inputs. E.g. if x
1
and x
2
are two input vectors and z
1
and z
2
are the locations of the corresponding winning output nodes,
then z
1
and z
2
should be close if x
1
and x
2
are similar. A network that performs this kind of
mapping is called a feature map.
In the brain, neurons tend to cluster in groups. The connections within the group are much
greater than the connections with the neurons outside of the group. Kohonen's network tries to
mimic this in a simple way.
© A.G.Billard 2004 – Last Update March 2011