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First Play With SOM and GSOM

We recommend to look on the “First Play With PCA” tutorial before you start this play with SOM and GSOM.

Click on the “Data set” button

DataSetMenu.bmpScatterMenu.bmp

Use the “Scatter” button with various “Caliber” and “Number of points” values; in addition, you may add several random points using the button “Random”.

Prepare a cloud of data points. We prepared a data cloud that slightly resembles a horseshoe:


Go to “SOM” and click the “Random init.” button several times (we used 15 times). This is the random initiation of SOM: 15 initial positions of coding vectors are randomly selected at data points:

 

Click on the “Learn” button. After learning, everybody would like to see the result. Go to the “Learning history”. The history of iterations will be demonstrated step by step. There are 13 steps in the history with the final result at the end. Below, after the random initiation, the steps 1, 2, 3, 8, and 13 are presented below.

 

You can use the “Show error” button and find the value of FVU in the right bottom corner. Here it is 7.99%.

 

The result depends on the initial position. You can change the initiation for the same data set, just push the “Remove initiation” button. When we started from another random initiation with the same amount of points (15), we got significantly different result. The story is presented below. There are 17 steps in the history. We represent the random initiation and the steps 1, 2, 3, 9, and 17:

The value of FVU for this approximation is a bit better than for the previous one, 7.08% versus 7.99%. It may be useful to try several initial approximations and select the result with the smallest FVU. Can you do this?

You can also select the PCA initialization, just click several times on the “PCA init” button. We generated the PCA initiation for the same number of points (15) and found SOM. The history is below. There are 16 steps in the history, and we present here steps 1, 2, 3, 10, and 16. The FVU for this initiation is 10.31 which is significantly worse than for the previous examples of the random initiation. (Sometimes, for other data sets, the PCA initialization can work better.)

A research task. Efficiency of the PCA initiation: a myth or reality. You can often read that PCA initiation of SOM is better. Of course, one benefit is obvious. It is reproducibility: if you start SOM learning from the PCA initiation with the same number of points uniformly distributed along the first principal component with the same variance then the result does not change. But it is not obvious that the PCA initiation is better for approximation. Moreover, random initiation gives the possibility to generate several different SOMs and then select the best. Try to compare systematically different types of initiations on various data sets. It may be useful to use the Std. data collections. (We recommend you to try Spiral 2 that is a not very difficult but not trivial learning example.)

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You can explore the approximation ability of 1D SOMs on various sets from the Std. data collections. Let us try “Spiral 1”; this is a rather difficult task. We will study, how the accuracy of approximation depends on the number of points. Let us go to “Std. data”, “Clear all”, and “Spiral 1” (below). For smearing the image we go to “Scatter” and select the Scattering radius 7 and the Number of points to add 3. After we press OK, the smeared spiral appears.

 

We initiated SOM with various numbers of nodes and, after learning, got the following results. Nine configurations are below.

It is interesting to compare SOM and GSOM on this example. To stop GSOM at the given number of points, you can select in GSOM/Options a high accuracy of approximation (0.1% or 0.01%) and the desired number of points (see below). For reproducibility, it is recommended to start from one point (the first learning iteration will move to the mean point).

Below are the learning results for the same numbers of points in GSOM as for the SOMs above. The picture of approximation for GSOM looks more attractive than for SOM but the accuracy of approximation (see in Table) is approximately the same.

Table. FVU for presented examples of SOM and GSOM with various numbers of nodes.

Number of nodes

10

15

20

25

30

40

50

60

70

FVU for SOM

25.45%

15.59%

12.09%

9.20%

6.42%

5.09%

4.13%

3.62%

2.63%

FVU for GSOM

24.91%

15.85%

12.26%

9.19%

6.99%

4.58%

4.03%

3.68%

3.19%

 

If the learning history is too long then to speed the slideshow you are welcome to reduce the delay time (in the “Delay” window) to the minimal value 10 ms.

 

Research task. Find for Spiral 1, for what number of nodes GSOM becomes stably better than SOM. Can you perform a detailed and scientifically sound study?

For example, the 200 nodes approximation of Spiral 1 by GSOM is almost 10 times better than the approximation by SOM (see the results below, for 200 SOM nodes FVU=0.44% and for 200 GSOM nodes FVU=0.05%). For 208 nodes, FVU for GSOM becomes 0.03% and geometrically this approximation looks perfect.

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