Rival penalized competitive learning for clustering analysis, RBF net, and curve detection.

It is shown that frequency sensitive competitive learning (FSCL), one version of the recently improved competitive learning (CL) algorithms, significantly deteriorates in performance when the number of units is inappropriately selected. An algorithm called rival penalized competitive learning (RPCL) is proposed. In this algorithm, not only is the winner unit modified to adapt to the input for each input, but its rival (the 2nd winner) is delearned by a smaller learning rate. RPCL can be regarded as an unsupervised extension of Kohonen's supervised LVQ2. RPCL has the ability to automatically allocate an appropriate number of units for an input data set. The experimental results show that RPCL outperforms FSCL when used for unsupervised classification, for training a radial basis function (RBF) network, and for curve detection in digital images.