s-DRN: Stabilized Developmental Resonance Network

TL;DR

The paper introduces s-DRN, a stabilized incremental clustering method that improves stability and accuracy in online data clustering by addressing conventional instability issues and refining node grouping criteria.

Contribution

It proposes a scalable activation function and new node grouping criteria to enhance stability and robustness in online incremental clustering.

Findings

s-DRN outperforms baseline methods in stability and accuracy

Effective exclusion of unnecessary clusters improves robustness

Performance is consistent across diverse real-world datasets

Abstract

Online incremental clustering of sequentially incoming data without prior knowledge suffers from changing cluster numbers and tends to fall into local extrema according to given data order. To overcome these limitations, we propose a stabilized developmental resonance network (s-DRN). First, we analyze the instability of the conventional choice function during the node activation process and design a scalable activation function to make clustering performance stable over all input data scales. Next, we devise three criteria for the node grouping algorithm: distance, intersection over union (IoU) and size criteria. The proposed node grouping algorithm effectively excludes unnecessary clusters from incrementally created clusters, diminishes the performance dependency on vigilance parameters and makes the clustering process robust. To verify the performance of the proposed s-DRN model, comparative studies are conducted on six real-world datasets whose statistical characteristics are distinctive. The comparative studies demonstrate the proposed s-DRN outperforms baselines in terms of stability and accuracy.