Principal Components Self-Organizing Map PC-SOM

Self-organizing map (SOM), a unsupervised learning neural network, has been developed by T. Kohonen since 1980's. Main application areas were pattern recognition and text retrieval. Because of that, it has not been spread to statisticians until late. Recently, SOM's are frequently drawn in data mining fields. Kohonen's SOM, however, needs improvements to become a statistician's standard tool. First, there should be a good guideline as for the size of map. Second, an enhanced visualization mode is wanted. In this study, principal components self-organizing map (PC-SOM), a modification of Kohonen's SOM, is proposed to meet such needs. PC-SOM performs one-dimensional SOM during the first stage to decompose input units into node weights and residuals. At the second stage, another one-dimensional SOM is applied to the residuals of the first stage. Finally, by putting together two stages, one obtains two-dimensional SOM. Such procedure can be easily expanded to construct three or more dimensional maps. The number of grid lines along the second axis is determined automatically, once that of the first axis is given by the data analyst. Furthermore, PC-SOM provides easily interpretable map axes. Such merits of PC-SOM are demonstrated with well-known Fisher's iris data and a simulated data set.

주성분 자기조직화 지도 PC-SOM

자기조직화 지도(SOM)은 T. 코호넨의 주도하에 개발된 비지도 학습 신경망 모형이다. 그 동안 패턴인식과 문서검색 분야에 주로 응용되어 왔기 때문에 통계학 분야에서는 덜 알려졌으나, 최근 K-평균 군집화에 대한 대안적 데이터 마이닝 기법으로 활용되기 시작하였다. 본 연구에서는 SOM의 한 버전인 PC-SOM(주성분 자기조직화 지도)을 제안하고 활용 예를 제시하고자 한다. PC-SOM은 1차원적 SOM 알고리즘을 반복 수행하여 2차원, 3차원 등의 SOM을 얻는 방법이기 때문에 기존 SOM과는 달리 사전 Map의 크기를 확정할 필요가 없다. 또한, 기존 SOM에 비하여 향상된 시각화를 가능하게 한다.