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Competitive Hebbian Learning

This method (Martinetz and Schulten, 1991; Martinetz, 1993) is usually not used on its own but in conjunction with other methods (see sections 5.3 and 5.4). It is, however, instructive to study competitive Hebbian learning on its own. The method does not change reference vectors at all (which could be interpreted as having a zero learning rate). It only generates a number of neighborhood edges between the units of the network. It was proved by Martinetz (1993) that the so generated graph is optimally topology-preserving in a very general sense. In particular each edge of this graph belongs to the Delaunay triangulation corresponding to the given set of reference vectors. The complete competitive Hebbian learning algorithm is the following:

1.
Initialize the set tex2html_wrap_inline4743 to contain N units tex2html_wrap_inline4747
equation1664
with reference vectors tex2html_wrap_inline4749 chosen randomly according to tex2html_wrap_inline4751.

Initialize the connection set tex2html_wrap_inline4753 , tex2html_wrap_inline4755, to the empty set:
equation1674

2.
Generate at random an input signal tex2html_wrap_inline4757 according to tex2html_wrap_inline4759.
3.
Determine units tex2html_wrap_inline4761 and tex2html_wrap_inline4763 tex2html_wrap_inline4765 such that
equation1620
and
equation1624
4.
If a connection between tex2html_wrap_inline4771 and tex2html_wrap_inline4773 does not exist already, create it:
equation1628
5.
Continue with step 2 unless the maximum number of signals is reached.

Figure 5.3 shows some stages of a simulation for a simple ring-shaped data distribution. Figure 5.4 displays the final results after 40000 adaptation steps for three other distribution.

 figure1720
Figure 5.3:   Competitive Hebbian learning simulation sequence for a ring-shaped uniform probability distribution. a) Initial state. b-f) Intermediate states. g) Final state. h) Voronoi tessellation corresponding to the final state. Obviously, the method is sensitive to initialization since the initial positions are always equal to the final positions.

 figure1810
Figure:   Competitive Hebbian learning simulation results after 40000 input signals for three different probability distributions (described in the caption of figure 4.4).


next up previous contents
Next: Neural Gas plus Competitive Up: Soft Competitive Learning without Previous: Neural Gas

Bernd Fritzke
Sat Apr 5 18:17:58 MET DST 1997