Improving the resultant quality of Kohonen's self organizing map using stiffness factor

Abstract

The performance of Self Organizing Map (SOM) is always influenced by learn methods. The resultant quality of the topological formation of the SOM is also highly dependent onto the learning rate and the neighborhood function. In literature, there are plenty of studies to find a proper method to improve the quality of SOM. However, a new term "stiffness factor" has been proposed and was used in SOM training in this paper. The effect of the stiffness factor has also been tested with a real-world problem and got positive influence