What is a Competitive Learning Network
Sunday, May 28th, 2006A competitive learning network (CLN) is an unsupervised learning technique that is used to find similarities in examples in a dataset and therefore suggest groupings of the examples. This is known as a clustering algorithm since it “clusters” the data examples together into similar groups. It is called unsupervised because we do not tell the algorithm how to group the examples together. It is left to its own devices to figure out any similarities in the data.
A CLN is made up of two layers of nodes; an input layer and an output layer. Each node in the input layer connects to every node in the output layer. Each connection has a weight assigned to it. The values assigned to these weights are where knowledge is stored in this network. The each node in the input layer is associated with a feature in the dataset. Each node in the output layer corresponds to a potential grouping of the data.
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