Improving Feature Map Quality of SOM Based on Adjusting the Neighborhood Function

Abstract

This chapter presents a study on improving the quality of the self-organizing map (SOM). We have synthesized the relevant research on assessing and improving the quality of SOM in recent years, and then proposed a solution to improve the quality of the feature map by adjusting parameters of the Gaussian neighborhood function. We have used quantization error and topographical error to evaluate the quality of the obtained feature map. The experiment was conducted on 12 published datasets and compared the obtained results with some other improving neighborhood function methods. The proposed method received the feature map with better quality than other solutions.