A Growing Neural Gas Network Learns Topologies
Bernd Fritzke · 1994
An incremental network model is introduced which is able to learn the important topological relations in a given set of input vectors by means of a simple Hebb-like learning rule. In contrast to previous approaches like the "neural gas" method of Martinetz and Schulten (1991, 1994), this model has no parameters which change over time and is able to continue learning, adding units and connections, until a performance criterion has been met. Applications of the model include vector quantization, clustering, and interpolation. 1 INTRODUCTION In unsupervised learning settings only input data is available but no information on the desired output. What can the goal of learning be in this situation? One possible objective is dimensionality reduction: finding a low-dimensional subspace of the input vector space containing most or all of the input data. Linear subspaces with this property can be computed directly by principal component analysis or iteratively with a number of network models (S...