Multiorder neurons for evolutionary higher-order clustering and growth

This letter proposes to use multiorder neurons for clustering irregularly shaped data arrangements. Multiorder neurons are an evolutionary extension of the use of higher-order neurons in clustering. Higher-order neurons parametrically model complex neuron shapes by replacing the classic synaptic weight by higher-order tensors. The multiorder neuron goes one step further and eliminates two problems associated with higher-order neurons. First, it uses evolutionary algorithms to select the best neuron order for a given problem. Second, it obtains more information about the underlying data distribution by identifying the correct order for a given cluster of patterns. Empirically we observed that when the correlation of clusters found with ground truth information is used in measuring clustering accuracy, the proposed evolutionary multiorder neurons method can be shown to outperform other related clustering methods. The simulation results from the Iris, Wine, and Glass data sets show significant improvement when compared to the results obtained using self-organizing maps and higher-order neurons. The letter also proposes an intuitive model by which multiorder neurons can be grown, thereby determining the number of clusters in data

A Multi-signal Variant for the GPU-based Parallelization of Growing Self-Organizing Networks

Among the many possible approaches for the parallelization of self-organizing networks, and in particular of growing self-organizing networks, perhaps the most common one is producing an optimized, parallel implementation of the standard sequential algorithms reported in the literature. In this paper we explore an alternative approach, based on a new algorithm variant specifically designed to match the features of the large-scale, fine-grained parallelism of GPUs, in which multiple input signals are processed at once. Comparative tests have been performed, using both parallel and sequential implementations of the new algorithm variant, in particular for a growing self-organizing network that reconstructs surfaces from point clouds. The experimental results show that this approach allows harnessing in a more effective way the intrinsic parallelism that the self-organizing networks algorithms seem intuitively to suggest, obtaining better performances even with networks of smaller size.Comment: 17 page

Somoclu: An Efficient Parallel Library for Self-Organizing Maps

Somoclu is a massively parallel tool for training self-organizing maps on large data sets written in C++. It builds on OpenMP for multicore execution, and on MPI for distributing the workload across the nodes in a cluster. It is also able to boost training by using CUDA if graphics processing units are available. A sparse kernel is included, which is useful for high-dimensional but sparse data, such as the vector spaces common in text mining workflows. Python, R and MATLAB interfaces facilitate interactive use. Apart from fast execution, memory use is highly optimized, enabling training large emergent maps even on a single computer.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures. The code is available at https://peterwittek.github.io/somoclu

Lifelong Learning of Spatiotemporal Representations with Dual-Memory Recurrent Self-Organization

Artificial autonomous agents and robots interacting in complex environments are required to continually acquire and fine-tune knowledge over sustained periods of time. The ability to learn from continuous streams of information is referred to as lifelong learning and represents a long-standing challenge for neural network models due to catastrophic forgetting. Computational models of lifelong learning typically alleviate catastrophic forgetting in experimental scenarios with given datasets of static images and limited complexity, thereby differing significantly from the conditions artificial agents are exposed to. In more natural settings, sequential information may become progressively available over time and access to previous experience may be restricted. In this paper, we propose a dual-memory self-organizing architecture for lifelong learning scenarios. The architecture comprises two growing recurrent networks with the complementary tasks of learning object instances (episodic memory) and categories (semantic memory). Both growing networks can expand in response to novel sensory experience: the episodic memory learns fine-grained spatiotemporal representations of object instances in an unsupervised fashion while the semantic memory uses task-relevant signals to regulate structural plasticity levels and develop more compact representations from episodic experience. For the consolidation of knowledge in the absence of external sensory input, the episodic memory periodically replays trajectories of neural reactivations. We evaluate the proposed model on the CORe50 benchmark dataset for continuous object recognition, showing that we significantly outperform current methods of lifelong learning in three different incremental learning scenario

Fast training of self organizing maps for the visual exploration of molecular compounds

Visual exploration of scientific data in life science area is a growing research field due to the large amount of available data. The Kohonen’s Self Organizing Map (SOM) is a widely used tool for visualization of multidimensional data. In this paper we present a fast learning algorithm for SOMs that uses a simulated annealing method to adapt the learning parameters. The algorithm has been adopted in a data analysis framework for the generation of similarity maps. Such maps provide an effective tool for the visual exploration of large and multi-dimensional input spaces. The approach has been applied to data generated during the High Throughput Screening of molecular compounds; the generated maps allow a visual exploration of molecules with similar topological properties. The experimental analysis on real world data from the National Cancer Institute shows the speed up of the proposed SOM training process in comparison to a traditional approach. The resulting visual landscape groups molecules with similar chemical properties in densely connected regions

Advances in Self Organising Maps

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) with its related extensions is the most popular artificial neural algorithm for use in unsupervised learning, clustering, classification and data visualization. Over 5,000 publications have been reported in the open literature, and many commercial projects employ the SOM as a tool for solving hard real-world problems. Each two years, the "Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps" (WSOM) covers the new developments in the field. The WSOM series of conferences was initiated in 1997 by Prof. Teuvo Kohonen, and has been successfully organized in 1997 and 1999 by the Helsinki University of Technology, in 2001 by the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, and in 2003 by the Kyushu Institute of Technology. The Universit\'{e} Paris I Panth\'{e}on Sorbonne (SAMOS-MATISSE research centre) organized WSOM 2005 in Paris on September 5-8, 2005.Comment: Special Issue of the Neural Networks Journal after WSOM 05 in Pari

Fast Algorithm and Implementation of Dissimilarity Self-Organizing Maps

In many real world applications, data cannot be accurately represented by vectors. In those situations, one possible solution is to rely on dissimilarity measures that enable sensible comparison between observations. Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map (SOM) has been adapted to data described only through their dissimilarity matrix. This algorithm provides both non linear projection and clustering of non vector data. Unfortunately, the algorithm suffers from a high cost that makes it quite difficult to use with voluminous data sets. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that provides an important reduction of the theoretical cost of the dissimilarity SOM without changing its outcome (the results are exactly the same as the ones obtained with the original algorithm). Moreover, we introduce implementation methods that result in very short running times. Improvements deduced from the theoretical cost model are validated on simulated and real world data (a word list clustering problem). We also demonstrate that the proposed implementation methods reduce by a factor up to 3 the running time of the fast algorithm over a standard implementation

S-TREE: Self-Organizing Trees for Data Clustering and Online Vector Quantization

This paper introduces S-TREE (Self-Organizing Tree), a family of models that use unsupervised learning to construct hierarchical representations of data and online tree-structured vector quantizers. The S-TREE1 model, which features a new tree-building algorithm, can be implemented with various cost functions. An alternative implementation, S-TREE2, which uses a new double-path search procedure, is also developed. S-TREE2 implements an online procedure that approximates an optimal (unstructured) clustering solution while imposing a tree-structure constraint. The performance of the S-TREE algorithms is illustrated with data clustering and vector quantization examples, including a Gauss-Markov source benchmark and an image compression application. S-TREE performance on these tasks is compared with the standard tree-structured vector quantizer (TSVQ) and the generalized Lloyd algorithm (GLA). The image reconstruction quality with S-TREE2 approaches that of GLA while taking less than 10% of computer time. S-TREE1 and S-TREE2 also compare favorably with the standard TSVQ in both the time needed to create the codebook and the quality of image reconstruction.Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-10409, N00014-95-0G57