Generative Topographic Map - Comparison With Kohonen's Self-organizing Maps

Comparison With Kohonen's Self-organizing Maps

While nodes in the self-organizing map (SOM) can wander around at will, GTM nodes are constrained by the allowable transformations and their probabilities. If the deformations are well-behaved the topology of the latent space is preserved.

The SOM was created as a biological model of neurons and is a heuristic algorithm. By contrast, the GTM has nothing to do with neuroscience or cognition and is a probabilistically principled model. Thus, it has a number of advantages over SOM, namely:

  • it explicitly formulates a density model over the data.
  • it uses a cost function that quantifies how well the map is trained.
  • it uses a sound optimization procedure (EM algorithm).

GTM was introduced by Bishop, Svensen and Williams in their Technical Report in 1997 (Technical Report NCRG/96/015, Aston University, UK) published later in Neural Computation. It was also described in the PhD thesis of Markus Svensen (Aston, 1998).

Read more about this topic:  Generative Topographic Map

Famous quotes containing the words comparison with, comparison and/or maps:

    He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    And now good morrow to our waking souls,
    Which watch not one another out of fear;
    For love all love of other sights controls,
    And makes one little room an everywhere.
    Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
    Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
    Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.
    John Donne (1572–1631)