Information-Theoretic Active SOM for Improving Generalization Performance

In this paper, we introduce a new type of information-theoretic method called “information-theoretic active SOM”, based on the self-organizing maps (SOM) for training multi-layered neural networks. The SOM is one of the most important techniques in unsupervised learning. However, SOM knowledge is sometimes ambiguous and cannot be easily interpreted. Thus, we introduce the information-theoretic method to produce clearer and interpretable representations. The present method extends this information-theoretic approach into supervised learning. The main contribution can be summarized by three points. First, it is shown that clear representations by the information-theoretic method can be effective in training supervised learning. Second, the method is sufficiently simple where there are two separated components, namely, information maximization and error minimization component. Usually, two components are mixed in one framework, and it is difficult to compromise between them. In addition, the knowledge obtained by this information-theoretic SOM can be used to solve the shortage of unlabeled data, because the information maximization component is unsupervised and can process all input data with and without labels. The method was applied to the well-known image segmentation datasets. Experimental results showed that clear weights were produced and generalization performance was improved by using the information-theoretic SOM. In addition, the final results were stable, almost independent of the parameter values.