Information Enhancement Learning: Local Enhanced Information to Detect the Importance of Input Variables in Competitive Learning

In this paper, we propose a new information-theoretic method called ”information enhancement learning” to realize competitive learning and self-organizing maps. In addition, we propose a computational method to detect the importance of input variables and to find the optimal input variables. In our information enhancement learning, there are three types of information, namely, self-enhancement, collective enhancement and local enhancement. With self-enhancement and collective enhancement, we can realize self-organizing maps. In addition, we use local enhanced information to detect the importance of input units or input variables. Then, the variance of local information is used to determine the optimal values of the enhanced information. We applied the method to an artificial data. In the problem, information enhancement learning was able to produce self-organizing maps close to those produced by the conventional SOM. In addition, the importance of input variables detected by local enhanced information corresponded to the importance obtained by directly computing errors.