Incremental grid growing: encoding high-dimensional structure into a two-dimensional feature map

Ordinary feature maps with fully connected, fixed grid topology cannot properly reflect the structure of clusters in the input space. Incremental feature map algorithms, where nodes and connections are added to or deleted from the map according to the input distribution can overcome this problem. Such algorithms have been limited to maps that can be drawn in 2-D only in the case of two-dimensional input space. In the proposed approach, nodes are added incrementally to a regular two-dimensional grid, which is drawable at all times, irrespective of the dimensionality of the input space. The process results in a map that explicitly represents the cluster structure of the high-dimensional input