HIERARCHICAL CLUSTER ANALYSIS by arboART NEURAL NETWORKS and its APPLICATION to KANSEI EVALUATION DATA ANALYSIS

ART (Adaptive Resonance Theory [1]) neural network and its variations perform non-hierarchical clustering by unsupervised learning. We propose a scheme "arboART" for hierarchical clustering by using several ART1.5-SSS networks. It classifies multidimensional vectors as a cluster tree, and finds features of clusters. The Basic idea of arboART is to use the prototype formed in an ART network as an input to other ART network that has looser distance criteria (Ishihara, et al., [2,3]). By sending prototype vectors made by ART to one after another, many small categories are combined into larger and more generalized categories. We can draw a dendrogram using classification records of sample and categories. We have confirmed its ability using standard test data commonly used in pattern recognition community. The clustering result is better than traditional computing methods, on separation of outliers, smaller error (diameter) of clusters and causes no chaining. This methodology is applied to Kansei evaluation experiment data analysis.