Monday, March 19, 2012

Interpolation with SOMs

The traditional use of a SOM is to reduce the dimensionality of the data through vector quantization.
It may be possible, however, to use SOMs to interpolate across a data space based on a small number of data points.  Turns out that not only is it possible, but it has been done by a number of people!

  • Goppert and Rosenstiel (1997) The Continuous Interpolating Self-Organizing Map, Neural Processing Letters, 5:185-192.
  • Yin and Allinson (1999) Interpolating self-organizing map (iSOM), Electronics Letters, 35(19):1649-1650.
  • Kawano, Orii, Shiraishi and Maeda (2010) A Method for Multiple Image Interpolation Employing Self-Organizing Map, Proceedings of the SMC'2010, pages 4035-4040, 10-13 October, Istanbul.
Now, applying this to RL so that we can construct an attractor landscape is a very interesting idea.