Adaptive Resonance Theory-based Topological Clustering with a Divisive Hierarchical Structure Capable of Continual Learning

Thanks to an ability for handling the plasticity-stability dilemma, Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) is considered as an effective approach for realizing continual learning. In general, however, the clustering performance of ART-based algorithms strongly depends on a similarity threshold, i.e., a vigilance parameter, which is data-dependent and specified by hand. This paper proposes an ART-based topological clustering algorithm with a mechanism that automatically estimates a similarity threshold from a distribution of data points. In addition, for the improving information extraction performance, a divisive hierarchical clustering algorithm capable of continual learning is proposed by introducing a hierarchical structure to the proposed algorithm. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm shows the comparative clustering performance compared with recently proposed hierarchical clustering algorithms.