Towards Growing Self-Organizing Neural Networks with Fixed Dimensionality

The competitive learning is an adaptive process in which the neurons in a neural network gradually become sensitive to different input pattern clusters. The basic idea behind the Kohonen’s Self-Organizing Feature Maps (SOFM) is competitive learning. SOFM can generate mappings from high-dimensional signal spaces to lower dimensional topological structures. The main features of this kind of mappings are topology preserving, feature mappings and probability distribution approximation of input patterns. To overcome some limitations of SOFM, e.g., a fixed number of neural units and a topology of fixed dimensionality, Growing Self-Organizing Neural Network (GSONN) can be used. GSONN can change its topological structure during learning. It grows by learning and shrinks by forgetting. To speed up the training and convergence, a new variant of GSONN, twin growing cell structures (TGCS) is presented here. This paper first gives an introduction to competitive learning, SOFM and its variants. Then, we discuss some GSONN with fixed dimensionality, which include growing cell structures, its variants and the author’s model: TGCS. It is ended with some testing results comparison and conclusions. Keywords—Artificial neural networks, Competitive learning, Growing cell structures, Self-organizing feature maps.