Automated and Weighted Self-Organizing Time Maps
This work addresses the need for improved evolutionary clustering in domains like finance and risk assessment, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing SOTM methods.
The paper tackles the problem of visual dynamic clustering by proposing automated and weighted Self-Organizing Time Maps (SOTMs), which enable data-driven parameterization and adjustment to data characteristics over time, as illustrated on real-world datasets including country-level risk indicators and firm-level credit risks.
This paper proposes schemes for automated and weighted Self-Organizing Time Maps (SOTMs). The SOTM provides means for a visual approach to evolutionary clustering, which aims at producing a sequence of clustering solutions. This task we denote as visual dynamic clustering. The implication of an automated SOTM is not only a data-driven parametrization of the SOTM, but also the feature of adjusting the training to the characteristics of the data at each time step. The aim of the weighted SOTM is to improve learning from more trustworthy or important data with an instance-varying weight. The schemes for automated and weighted SOTMs are illustrated on two real-world datasets: (i) country-level risk indicators to measure the evolution of global imbalances, and (ii) credit applicant data to measure the evolution of firm-level credit risks.