Sometimes the reference vectors should be distributed such that each reference vector has the same chance to be winner for a randomly generated input signal 
:
If we interpret the generation of an input signal and the subsequent
mapping onto the nearest unit in 
as random experiment which
assigns a value 
to the random variable X, then
(3.3) is equivalent to maximizing the entropy
with 
being the expectation operator.
If the data is generated from a continuous probability distribution
, then (3.3) is equivalent to
In the case of a finite data set 
(3.3)
corresponds to the situation where each Voronoi set 
contains
(up to discretization effects) the same number of data vectors:
An advantage of choosing reference vectors such as to maximize entropy is the inherent robustness of the resulting system. The removal (or ``failure'') of any reference vector affects only a limited fraction of the data.
Entropy maximization and error minimization can in general not be
achieved simultaneously. In particular if the data distribution is
highly non-uniform both goals differ considerably. Consider, e.g., a signal distribution 
where 50 percent of the input signals come from a
very small (point-like) region of the input space, whereas the other
fifty percent are uniformly distributed within a huge hypercube. To
maximize entropy half of the reference vectors have to be positioned
in each region. To minimize quantization error however, only one
single vector should be positioned in the point-like region (reducing
the quantization error for the signals there basically to zero) and
all others should be uniformly distributed within the hypercube.