Graphics Hardware Implementation of the Parameter-Less Self-organising Map

Abstract

This paper presents a highly parallel implementation of a new type of Self-Organising Map (SOM) using graphics hardware. The Parameter-Less SOM smoothly adapts to new data while preserving the mapping formed by previous data. It is therefore in principle highly suited for interactive use, however for large data sets the computational requirements are prohibitive. This paper will present an implementation on commodity graphics hardware which uses two forms of parallelism to significantly reduce this barrier. The performance is analysed experimentally and algorithmically. An advantage to using graphics hardware is that visualisation is essentially “free”, thus increasing its suitability for interactive exploration of large data sets.