A self-growing probabilistic decision-based neural network with automatic data clustering

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new clustering algorithm for a mixture of Gaussian-based neural network and self-growing probabilistic decision-based neural networks (SPDNN). The proposed self-growing cluster learning (SGCL) algorithm is able to find the natural number of prototypes based on a self-growing validity measure, Bayesian information criterion (BIC). The learning process starts from a single prototype randomly initialized in the feature space and grows adaptively during the learning process until most appropriate number of prototypes are found. We have conducted numerical and real-world experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the SGCL algorithm. In the results of using SGCL to train the SPDNN for data clustering and speaker identification problems, we have observed a noticeable improvement among various model-based or vector quantization-based classification schemes. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.