Improvement of Self Organizing Maps using Gap Statistic and Probability Distribution

Clustering is a method for unsupervised learning. General clustering tools have been depended on statistical methods and machine learning algorithms. One of the popular clustering algorithms based on machine learning is the self organizing map(SOM). SOM is a neural networks model for clustering. SOM and extended SOM have been used in diverse classification and clustering fields such as data mining. But, SOM has had a problem determining optimal number of clusters. In this paper, we propose an improvement of SOM using gap statistic and probability distribution. The gap statistic was introduced to estimate the number of clusters in a dataset. We use gap statistic for settling the problem of SOM. Also, in our research, weights of feature nodes are updated by probability distribution. After complete updating according to prior and posterior distributions, the weights of SOM have probability distributions for optima clustering. To verify improved performance of our work, we make experiments compared with other learning algorithms using simulation data sets.