SOM++: Integration of self-organizing map and K-Means++ algorithms

Abstract

Data clustering is an important and widely used task of data mining that groups similar items together into subsets. This paper introduces a new clustering algorithm SOM++, which first uses K-Means++ method to determine the initial weight values and the starting points, and then uses Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to find the final clustering solution. The purpose of this algorithm is to provide a useful technique to improve the solution of the data clustering and data mining in terms of runtime, the rate of unstable data points and internal error. This paper also presents the comparison of our algorithm with simple SOM and K-Means + SOM by using a real world data. The results show that SOM++ has a good performance in stability and significantly outperforms three other methods training time. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.