Competing and accommodating behaviors of peace SOM

The self-organizing map (SOM) attracts attentions for clustering in these years. In our past study, we have proposed a method using simultaneously two kinds of SOMs whose features are different, namely, one self-organizes the area on which input data are concentrated, and the other self-organizes the whole of the input space. Further, we have applied this method to clustering of data including a lot of noises and have confirmed the efficiency. However, in order to obtain an efficient clustering performance using this method, we must determine the appropriate number of the SOMs used in the method. In this study, we propose the peace SOM (PSOM) algorithm which possesses both competing and accommodating abilities. The competing and the accommodating behaviors of PSOM are investigated with applications to clustering input data including a lot of noises. We can see that PSOM successfully extracts clusters even in the case that we do not know the number of clusters in advance