s-DRN: Stabilized Developmental Resonance Network

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 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.