I'm trying to cluster some images depending on the angles between body parts.
The features extracted from each image are:
angle1 : torso - torso
angle2 : torso - upper left arm
..
angle10: torso - lower right foot
Therefore the input data is a matrix of size 1057x10, where 1057 stands for the number of images, and 10 stands for angles of body parts with torso.
Similarly a testSet is 821x10 matrix.
I want all the rows in input data to be clustered with 88 clusters.
Then I will use these clusters to find which clusters does TestData fall into?
In a previous work, I used K-Means clustering which is very straightforward. We just ask K-Means to cluster the data into 88 clusters. And implement another method that calculates the distance between each row in test data and the centers of each cluster, then pick the smallest values. This is the cluster of the corresponding input data row.
I have two questions:
Is it possible to do this using SOM in MATLAB?
AFAIK SOM's are for visual clustering. But I need to know the actual class of each cluster so that I can later label my test data by calculating which cluster it belongs to.
Do you have a better solution?
Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a clustering method considered as an unsupervised variation of the Artificial Neural Network (ANN). It uses competitive learning techniques to train the network (nodes compete among themselves to display the strongest activation to a given data)
You can think of SOM as if it consists of a grid of interconnected nodes (square shape, hexagonal, ..), where each node is an N-dim vector of weights (same dimension size as the data points we want to cluster).
The idea is simple; given a vector as input to SOM, we find the node closet to it, then update its weights and the weights of the neighboring nodes so that they approach that of the input vector (hence the name self-organizing). This process is repeated for all input data.
The clusters formed are implicitly defined by how the nodes organize themselves and form a group of nodes with similar weights. They can be easily seen visually.
SOM are in a way similar to the K-Means algorithm but different in that we don't impose a fixed number of clusters, instead we specify the number and shape of nodes in the grid that we want it to adapt to our data.
Basically when you have a trained SOM, and you want to classify a new test input vector, you simply assign it to the nearest (distance as a similarity measure) node on the grid (Best Matching Unit BMU), and give as prediction the [majority] class of the vectors belonging to that BMU node.
For MATLAB, you can find a number of toolboxes that implement SOM:
The Neural Network Toolbox from MathWorks can be used for clustering using SOM (see the nctool clustering tool).
Also worth checking out is the SOM Toolbox
Related
I've been learning about neural networks and most recently been trying out different clustering methods. But unlike KNN, GMM, or DBSCAN, there isn't a feature (in Matlab that I'm aware of) that identifies clusters for you. So I've been reading articles of how to interpret these plots, but I'm still confused. For my example, in the weight positions plot, I see one cluster. For the neighbor weight differences, I see one, maybe two clusters (yellow/bright - similar, red/dark - dissimilar). That seems to be confirmed when looking at the densities in the hits plot. There might be more, but I honestly I can't tell (I'm new at this) because of the gradient instead of a solid boundary between clusters. How many clusters do you see, and what's your logic? Thank you]1[]2[]3
selforgmap([5 5]
[net,tr] = train(net,x)
figure, plotsomnd(net)
figure, plotsomhits(net,x)
figure, plotsompos(net,x)
You may construct a new paradigm in relation with what the SOM nodes represent, i.e. they produce a new dataset. The new dataset is independent from the original dateset. Nevertheles, it is arranged somehow so that the underlying structure imitates that of the original dataset. Therefore, it is often found that people perform SOM with clustering algorithms such as K-means, Hierarchical Clustering, etc subsequently. This can be regarded as: instead of clustering directly from a huge amount of the original data, the clustering procedure is performed on a new version of the original dataset which is smaller but still inherits the topology of the original dataset. AFAIK, SOM is different from KNN in the sense that SOM is unsupervised whereas KNN is supervised.
Could someone please provide some information on how to properly combine a self organizing map with a multilayer perceptron?
I recently read some articles about this technique in comparison to regular MLPs and it performed way better in prediction tasks. So, I want to use the SOM as front-end for dimension reduction by clustering the input data and pass the results to an MLP back-end.
My current idea of implementing it is it to train the SOM with a couple of training sets and to determine the clusters. Afterwards, I initialize the MLP with as many input units as SOM clusters. Next step would be to train the MLP using the SOM's output (which value?...weights of BMU?) as in input for the network (SOM's Output for the Cluster matching Input Unit and zeros for any other Input Units?).
There is no single way of doing that. Let me list some possibilities:
The one you describe. But then, your MLP will need to have K*D inputs, where K is the number of clusters and D is the input dimension. There is no dimensionality reduction.
Similar to your idea, but instead of using the weights, just send 1 for the BMU and 0 for the remaining clusters. Then your MLP will need K inputs.
Same as above, but instead of 1 or 0, send the distance from the input vector to each cluster.
Same as above, but instead of the distance, compute a Gaussian activation for each cluster.
Since the SOM preserves topology, send only the 2D coordinates of the BMU (possibly normalized between 0 and 1). Then your MLP will need only 2 inputs and you achieve real extreme dimensionality reduction.
You can read about those ideas and some more here: Principal temporal extensions of SOM: Overview. It is not about feeding the output of a SOM to a MLP, but a SOM to itself. But you'll be able to understand the various possibilities when trying to produce some output from a SOM.
I have a question about using a clustering method vs fitting the same data with a distribution.
Assuming that I have a dataset with 2 features (feat_A and feat_B) and let's assume that I use a clustering algorithm to divide the data in an optimal number of clusters...say 3.
My goal is to assign for each of the input data [feat_Ai,feat_Bi] a probability (or something similar) that the point belongs to cluster 1 2 3.
a. First approach with clustering:
I cluster the data in the 3 clusters and I assign to each point the probability of belonging to a cluster depending on the distance from the center of that cluster.
b. Second approach using mixture model:
I fit a mixture model or mixture distribution to the data. Data are fit to the distribution using an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, which assigns posterior probabilities to each component density with respect to each observation. Clusters are assigned by selecting the component that maximizes the posterior probability.
In my problem I find the cluster centers (or I fit the model if approach b. is used) with a subsample of data. Then I have to assign a probability to a lot of other data... I would like to know in presence of new data which approach is better to use to still have meaningful assignments.
I would go for a clustering method for example a kmean because:
If the new data come from a distribution different from the one used to create the mixture model, the assignment could be not correct.
With new data the posterior probability changes.
The clustering method minimizes the variance of the clusters in order to find a kind of optimal separation border, the mixture model take into consideration the variance of the data to create the model (not sure that the clusters that will be formed are separated in an optimal way).
More info about the data:
Features shouldn't be assumed dependent.
Feat_A represents the duration of a physical activity Feat_B the step counts In principle we could say that with an higher duration of the activity the step counts increase, but it is not always true.
Please help me to think and if you have any other point please let me know..
I read the concept of GMM from Understanding concept of Gaussian Mixture Models. It is helpful for me. I have implemented GMM for fisheriris also but I didn't use fitgmdist function because I didn't have it. So I used code from http://chrisjmccormick.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/gaussian-mixture-models-tutorial-and-matlab-code/.
When I read Understanding concept of Gaussian Mixture Models, Amro could plot the result with its label, i.e. setosa, virginica, and versicolor. How did he do it? After some iterations, I only got mu, Sigma, and weight. There is no label at all. I want to put the label (setosa, virginica, and versicolor) to mixture models from GMM iteration.
There are two sets of "labels" in that plot:
one is the "true" labels of the Fisher Iris dataset (the species variable which contains the class of each instance: setoas, versicolor, or virginica). Normally you wouldn't have those in a real dataset (after all the goal of clustering is to discover those groups within the data, which you don't know beforehand). I just used them here to get an idea of how well the EM clustering performed against the actual truth (the scatter points are color-coded according to the class).
the other set of labels are the clusters we found using GMM. Basically I built a 50x50 grid of 2D points to cover the entire data domain, I then assign a cluster to each of those points by computing the posterior probability and choosing the component with highest likelihood. I showed those clusters in the background color. As a nice consequence, we get to see the discriminant decision boundaries between the clusters.
You can see that the cluster of points on the left got separated quite nicely (and perfectly matched the setosa class). While the points on the right side of the plot got separated in two matching the other two classes, although there were instance "misclassified" if you will (some green points on the wrong side of the boundary).
Typically in a real setting you wouldn't have those actual classes to compare against, so no way to tell how "accurate" your clustering was (there exist other metrics for clustering performance evaluation)...
Suppose that I performed clustering of iris.data using SOM Toolbox in Matlab. After clustering, I have an input vector and I want to see which cluster this input belongs to? Any tips please on how to map an input pattern into a trained SOM map.
Once you have trained the SOM, you can classify a new input vector by assigning it to the nearest node in the grid (Best Matching Unit BMU) which have the closest weights. We predict the majority class of the training vectors belonging to that BMU node as the target class of the test instance.