Unsupervised Functional Link Artificial Neural Networks for Cluster Analysis

In this paper, we propose a novel method of cluster analysis called unsupervised functional link artificial neural networks (UFLANNs), which inherit the best characteristics of functional link artificial neural networks and self-organizing feature maps (SOFMs). UFLANNs adopt three types of basis functions such as Chebyshev, Legendre orthogonal polynomials, and power series for mapping the input data into a new feature space with higher dimensions, where the objects are clustered based on the principle of competitive learning of SOFMs. The effectiveness of this algorithm has been tested with various artificial and real-life datasets including remote sensing images. A thorough comparison with other popular clustering algorithms shows that the proposed method is promising in revealing clusters from many complex datasets.