Generative topographic mapping by deterministic annealing

Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM) is an important technique for dimension reduction which has been successfully applied to many fields. However the usual Expectation-Maximization (EM) approach to GTM can easily get stuck in local minima and so we introduce a Deterministic Annealing (DA) approach to GTM which is more robust and less sensitive to initial conditions so we do not need to use many initial values to find good solutions. DA has been very successful in clustering, hidden Markov Models and Multidimensional Scaling but typically uses a fixed cooling schemes to control the temperature of the system. We propose a new cooling scheme which can adaptively adjust the choice of temperature in the middle of process to find better solutions. Our experimental measurements suggest that deterministic annealing improves the quality of GTM solutions. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.