Competitive Learning Neural Network with Dynamic Output Neuron Generation

동적으로 출력 뉴런을 생성하는 경쟁 학습 신경회로망

Conventional competitive learning algorithms compute the Euclidien distance to determine the winner neuron out of all predetermined output neurons. In such cases, there is a drawback that the performence of the learning algorithm depends on the initial reference(=weight) vectors. In this paper, we propose a new competitive learning algorithm that dynamically generates output neurons. The proposed method generates output neurons by dynamically changing the class thresholds for all output neurons. We compute the similarity between the input vector and the reference vector of each output neuron generated. If the two are similar, the reference vector is adjusted to make it still more like the input vector. Otherwise, the input vector is designated as the reference vector of a new outputneuron. Since the reference vectors of output neurons are dynamically assigned according to input pattern distribution, the proposed method gets around the phenomenon that learning is early determined due to redundant output neurons. Experiments using speech data have shown the proposed method to be superior to existint methods.