An empirical study on the robustness of SOM in preserving topology with respect to link density

Abstract

Practical implementations of SOM model require parallel and synchronous operation of the network during each iteration in the training stage. However this implicitly implies existence of some communication link between the winner neuron and all other neurons so that update can be induced to the neighboring neurons. In the current paper we report the results of an empirical study on the retention of topology preservation property of the SOM when such links become partially absent, so that during a training iteration not all the neighbors of the winner may be updated. We quantify our results using three different indexes for topology preservation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.