Piecewise Linear Projection Based on Self-Organizing Map

A piecewise linear projection algorithm, based on kohonen's Self-Organizing Map, is presented. Using this new algorithm, neural network is able to adapt its neural weights to accommodate with input space, while obtaining reduced 2-dimensional subspaces at each neural node. After completion of learning process, first project input data into their corresponding 2-D subspaces, then project all data in the 2-D subspaces into a reference 2-D subspace defined by a reference neural node. By piecewise linear projection, we can more easily deal with large data sets than other projection algorithms like Sammon's nonlinear mapping (NLM). There is no need to re-compute all the input data to interpolate new input data to the 2-D output space.