An Information-Theoretic-Cluster Visualization for Self-Organizing Maps

Electroencephalogram-Based Facial Gesture Recognition Using Self-Organizing Map

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow information to be transmitted directly from the human brain to a computer, enhancing the ability of human brain activity to interact with the environment. In particular, BCI-based control systems are highly desirable because they can control equipment used by people with disabilities, such as wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. BCIs make use of electroencephalograms (EEGs) to decode the human brain's status. This paper presents an EEG-based facial gesture recognition method based on a self-organizing map (SOM). The proposed facial gesture recognition uses α, β, and θ power bands of the EEG signals as the features of the gesture. The SOM-Hebb classifier is utilized to classify the feature vectors. We utilized the proposed method to develop an online facial gesture recognition system. The facial gestures were defined by combining facial movements that are easy to detect in EEG signals. The recognition accuracy of the system was examined through experiments. The recognition accuracy of the system ranged from 76.90% to 97.57% depending on the number of gestures recognized. The lowest accuracy (76.90%) occurred when recognizing seven gestures, though this is still quite accurate when compared to other EEG-based recognition systems. The implemented online recognition system was developed using MATLAB, and the system took 5.7 s to complete the recognition flow.

EpiVECS: exploring spatiotemporal epidemiological data using cluster embedding and interactive visualization

The analysis of data over space and time is a core part of descriptive epidemiology, but the complexity of spatiotemporal data makes this challenging. There is a need for methods that simplify the exploration of such data for tasks such as surveillance and hypothesis generation. In this paper, we use combined clustering and dimensionality reduction methods (hereafter referred to as 'cluster embedding' methods) to spatially visualize patterns in epidemiological time-series data. We compare several cluster embedding techniques to see which performs best along a variety of internal cluster validation metrics. We find that methods based on k-means clustering generally perform better than self-organizing maps on real world epidemiological data, with some minor exceptions. We also introduce EpiVECS, a tool which allows the user to perform cluster embedding and explore the results using interactive visualization. EpiVECS is available as a privacy preserving, in-browser open source web application at https://episphere.github.io/epivecs .

A Survey of Hardware Self-Organizing Maps

Self-organizing feature maps (SOMs) are commonly used technique for clustering and data dimensionality reduction in many application fields. Indeed, their inherent property of topology preservation and unsupervised learning of processed data without any prior knowledge put them in the front of candidates for data reduction in the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data (BD) technologies. However, the high computational cost of SOMs limits their use to offline approaches and makes the online real-time high-performance SOM processing more challenging and mostly reserved to specific hardware implementations. In this article, we present a survey of hardware (HW) SOM implementations found in the literature so far: the most widely used computing blocks, architectures, design choices, adaptation, and optimization techniques that have been reported in the field of hardware SOMs. Moreover, we give an overview of main challenges and trends for their ubiquitous adoption as hardware accelerators in many application fields. This article is expected to be useful for researchers in the areas of artificial intelligence, hardware architecture, and system design.

Visual Process Monitoring by Data-Dependent Kernel Discriminant Analysis with t-Distributed Similarities

Visual process monitoring would provide more directly appreciable and more easily comprehensible information about the process operating status as well as clear depictions of the occurrence path of faults; however, as a more challenging task, it has been sporadically discussed in the research literature on conventional process monitoring. In this paper, the Data-Dependent Kernel Discriminant Analysis (D2K-DA) model is proposed. A special data-dependent kernel function is constructed and learned from the measured data, so that the low-dimensional visualizations are guaranteed, combined with intraclass compactness, interclass separability, local geometry preservation, and global geometry preservation. The new optimization is innovatively designed by exploiting both discriminative information and t-distributed geometric similarities. On the construction of novel indexes for visualization, experiments of visual monitoring tasks on simulated and real-life industrial processes illustrate the merits of the proposed method.

The examination of the effect of the criterion for neural network’s learning on the effectiveness of the qualitative analysis of multidimensional data

A variety of multidimensional visualization methods are applied for the qualitative analysis of multidimensional data. One of the multidimensional data visualization methods is a method using autoassociative neural networks. In order to perform visualizations of n-dimensional data, such a network has n inputs, n outputs and one of the interlayers consisting of two outputs whose values represent coordinates of the analyzed sample’s image on the screen. Such a criterion for the network’s learning consists in that the same value as the one at the ith input appears at each ith output. If the network is trained in this way, the whole information from n inputs was compressed to two outputs of the interlayer and then decompressed to n network outputs. The paper shows the application of different learning criteria can be more beneficial from the point of view of the results’ readability. Overall analysis was conducted on seven-dimensional real data representing three coal classes, five-dimensional data representing printed characters, 216-dimensional data representing hand-written digits and, additionally, in order to illustrate additional explanations using artificially generated seven-dimensional data. Readability of results of the qualitative analysis of these data was compared using the multidimensional visualization utilizing neural networks for different learning criteria. Also, the obtained results of applying all analyzed criteria on 20 randomly selected sets of multidimensional data obtained from one of the publicly available repositories are presented.

Spatial Pyramid-Enhanced NetVLAD With Weighted Triplet Loss for Place Recognition

We propose an end-to-end place recognition model based on a novel deep neural network. First, we propose to exploit the spatial pyramid structure of the images to enhance the vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) such that the enhanced VLAD features can reflect the structural information of the images. To encode this feature extraction into the deep learning method, we build a spatial pyramid-enhanced VLAD (SPE-VLAD) layer. Next, we impose weight constraints on the terms of the traditional triplet loss (T-loss) function such that the weighted T-loss (WT-loss) function avoids the suboptimal convergence of the learning process. The loss function can work well under weakly supervised scenarios in that it determines the semantically positive and negative samples of each query through not only the GPS tags but also the Euclidean distance between the image representations. The SPE-VLAD layer and the WT-loss layer are integrated with the VGG-16 network or ResNet-18 network to form a novel end-to-end deep neural network that can be easily trained via the standard backpropagation method. We conduct experiments on three benchmark data sets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed model defeats the state-of-the-art deep learning approaches applied to place recognition.

State Clustering of the Hot Strip Rolling Process via Kernel Entropy Component Analysis and Weighted Cosine Distance

In the hot strip rolling process, many process parameters are related to the quality of the final products. Sometimes, the process parameters corresponding to different steel grades are close to, or even overlap, each other. In reality, locating overlap regions and detecting products with abnormal quality are crucial, yet challenging. To address this challenge, in this work, a novel method named kernel entropy component analysis (KECA)-weighted cosine distance is introduced for fault detection and overlap region locating. First, KECA is used to cluster the training samples of multiple steel grades, and the samples with incorrect classes are seen as the boundary of the sample distribution. Next, the concepts of recursive-based regional center and weighted cosine distance are introduced. For each steel grade, the regional center and the weight coefficients are determined. Finally, the weighted cosine distance between the testing sample and the regional center is chosen as the index to judge abnormal batches. The samples in the overlap region of multiple steel grades need to be focused on in the real production process, which is conducive to quality grade and combined production. The weighted cosine distances between the testing sample and different regional centers are used to locate the overlap region. A dataset from a hot steel rolling process is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods.

Distributed dual vigilance fuzzy adaptive resonance theory learns online, retrieves arbitrarily-shaped clusters, and mitigates order dependence

This paper presents a novel adaptive resonance theory (ART)-based modular architecture for unsupervised learning, namely the distributed dual vigilance fuzzy ART (DDVFA). DDVFA consists of a global ART system whose nodes are local fuzzy ART modules. It is equipped with distributed higher-order activation and match functions and a dual vigilance mechanism. Together, these allow DDVFA to perform unsupervised modularization, create multi-prototype cluster representations, retrieve arbitrarily-shaped clusters, and reduce category proliferation. Another important contribution is the reduction of order-dependence, an issue that affects any agglomerative clustering method. This paper demonstrates two approaches for mitigating order-dependence: pre-processing using visual assessment of cluster tendency (VAT) or post-processing using a novel Merge ART module. The former is suitable for batch processing, whereas the latter also works for online learning. Experimental results in online mode carried out on 30 benchmark data sets show that DDVFA cascaded with Merge ART statistically outperformed the best other ART-based systems when samples were randomly presented. Conversely, they were found to be statistically equivalent in offline mode when samples were pre-processed using VAT. Remarkably, performance comparisons to non-ART-based clustering algorithms show that DDVFA (which learns incrementally) was also statistically equivalent to the non-incremental (offline) methods of density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), single linkage hierarchical agglomerative clustering (SL-HAC), and k-means, while retaining the appealing properties of ART. Links to the source code and data are provided. Considering the algorithm's simplicity, online learning capability, and performance, it is an ideal choice for many agglomerative clustering applications.

Multidimensional Balance-Based Cluster Boundary Detection for High-Dimensional Data

The balance of neighborhood space around a central point is an important concept in cluster analysis. It can be used to effectively detect cluster boundary objects. The existing neighborhood analysis methods focus on the distribution of data, i.e., analyzing the characteristic of the neighborhood space from a single perspective, and could not obtain rich data characteristics. In this paper, we analyze the high-dimensional neighborhood space from multiple perspectives. By simulating each dimension of a data point's k nearest neighbors space ( k NNs) as a lever, we apply the lever principle to compute the balance fulcrum of each dimension after proving its inevitability and uniqueness. Then, we model the distance between the projected coordinate of the data point and the balance fulcrum on each dimension and construct the DHBlan coefficient to measure the balance of the neighborhood space. Based on this theoretical model, we propose a simple yet effective cluster boundary detection algorithm called Lever. Experiments on both low- and high-dimensional data sets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.