Optimal combination of SOM search in best-matching units and map neighborhood

Reference:

Mats Sjöberg and Jorma Laaksonen. Optimal combination of SOM search in best-matching units and map neighborhood. In Proceedings of 7th International Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (WSOM 2009), volume 5629 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 281–289, St. Augustine, Florida, USA, 2009. Springer. Available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02397-2_32.

Abstract:

The distribution of a class of objects, such as images depicting a specific topic, can be studied by observing the best-matching units (BMUs) of the objects' feature vectors on a Self-Organizing Map (SOM). When the BMU ``hits'' on the map are summed up, the class distribution may be seen as a two-dimensional histogram or discrete probability density. Due to the SOM's topology preserving property, one is motivated to smooth the value field and spread out the values spatially to neighboring units, from where one may expect to find further similar objects. In this paper we study the impact of using more map units than just the single BMU of each feature vector in modeling the class distribution. We demonstrate that by varying the number of units selected in this way and varying the width of the spatial convolution one can find an optimal combination which maximizes the class detection performance.

Suggested BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{WSOM2009MATS,
    address = {St. Augustine, Florida, USA},
    author = {Mats Sj{\"o}berg and Jorma Laaksonen},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of 7th International Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (WSOM 2009)},
    note = {Available online at: \url{http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02397-2\_32}},
    pages = {281-289},
    publisher = {Springer},
    series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
    title = {Optimal combination of {SOM} search in best-matching units and map neighborhood},
    volume = {5629},
    year = {2009},
}