Self organizing

networks

.
 What is Clustering?

Find K clusters (or a classification that consists of K clusters) so that

the objects of one cluster are similar to each other whereas objects of
different clusters are dissimilar.
• Clustering can be considered the most
important unsupervised learning problem; it
deals with finding a structure in a collection
of unlabeled data.
• A loose definition of clustering could be “the
process of organizing objects into groups
whose members are similar in some way”.
A cluster is therefore a collection of objects
which are “similar” between them and are
“dissimilar” to the objects belonging to other
clusters.
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 Examples of Clustering
Applications
• Marketing: Help marketers discover distinct groups in their customer bases,
and then use this knowledge to develop targeted marketing programs
• Land use: Identification of areas of similar land use in an earth observation
database
• Insurance: Identifying groups of motor insurance policy holders with a high
average claim cost
• City-planning: Identifying groups of houses according to their house type,
value, and geographical location
• Earth-quake studies: Observed earth quake epicenters should be clustered
along continent faults
Stages in clustering
• A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-
organising feature map (SOFM) is a type of
artificial neural network (ANN) that is trained
using unsupervised learning to produce a low-
dimensional (typically two-dimensional),
discretized representation of the input space
of the training samples, called a map.

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• Self-organizing maps are different from other
artificial neural networks as they apply
competitive learning as opposed to error-
correction learning (such as backpropagation
with gradient descent), and in the sense that
they use a neighborhood function to preserve
the topological properties of the input space

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• Where Self-organizing map (SOM) network is
commonly used network for clustering have
competitive layer consist of neurons which
group similar kind of data into classes.
Features extracted are provided as input to
input layer

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• Note :-In neural network, Feature Map means
map your input features to hidden units to
form new features to feed to the next layer.
• A feature map is a function which maps a data
vector to feature space. The main logic in
machine learning for doing so is to present
your learning algorithm with data that it is
better able to regress or classify.