Generative Topographic Map

Generative Topographic Map

Generative topographic map (GTM) is a machine learning method that is a probabilistic counterpart of the self-organizing map (SOM), is provably convergent and does not require a shrinking neighborhood or a decreasing step size. It is a generative model: the data is assumed to arise by first probabilistically picking a point in a low-dimensional space, mapping the point to the observed high-dimensional input space (via a smooth function), then adding noise in that space. The parameters of the low-dimensional probability distribution, the smooth map and the noise are all learned from the training data using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. GTM was introduced in 1996 in a paper by Christopher M. Bishop, Markus Svensen, and Christopher K. I. Williams.