A hybrid learning approach to self-organizing neural network for vector quantization

Neural networks for Vector Quantization (VQ) such as K-means, Neural-Gas (NG) network and Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map (SOM) have been proposed. K-means, which is a "hard-max" approach, converges very fast. The method, however, devotes itself to local search, and it easily falls into local minima. On the other hand, the NG and SOM methods, which are "soft-max" approaches, are good at the global search ability. Though NG and SOM exhibit better performance in coming close to the optimum than that of K-means, the methods converge slower than K-means. In order to the disadvantages that exist when K-means, NG and SOM are used individually, this paper proposes hybrid methods such as NG-K, SOM-K and SOM-NG. NG-K performs NG adaptation during short period of time early in the learning process, and then the method performs K-means adaptation in the rest of the process. SOM-K and SOM-NG are similar as NG-K. From numerical simulations including an image compression problem, NG-K and SOM-K exhibit better performance than other methods.