Hebbian learning clustering with Rulkov neurons

Abstract

The recent explosion of high dimensional, high resolution ‘big-data’ from automated bioinformatics measurement techniques demands new methods for unsupervised data processing. An essential analysis step is the identification of groups of similar data, or ‘clusters’, in noisy high-dimensional data spaces, as this permits to perform some analysis steps at the group level. Popular clustering algorithms introduce an undesired cluster shape bias, require prior knowledge of the number of clusters, and are unable to properly deal with noise. Manual data gating, often used to assist these methods, is based on low-dimensional projection techniques, which is prone to obscure the underlying data structure. While Hebbian Learning Clustering successfully overcomes all of these limitations (by using only local similarities to infer global structure), previous implementations were unsuited to deal with big data sets. Here, we present a novel implementation based on realistic neuronal dynamics that removes also this obstacle. By a performance that scales favourably compared to all standard clustering algorithms, unbiased large data analysis becomes feasible on standard desktop hardware.