Self-organising swarm (SOSwarm)

This paper introduces a novel version of the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm which we call self-organising swarm SOSwarm. SOSwarm can be used for unsupervised learning. In the algorithm, input vectors are projected into a lower-dimensional map space producing a visual representation of the input data in a manner similar to a self-organising map (SOM). In SOSwarm, particles react to input data during the learning process by modifying their velocities using an adaptation of the PSO velocity update function. SOSwarm is successfully applied to ten benchmark problems drawn from the UCI Machine Learning repository. The paper also demonstrates how the canonical SOM can be explored within the PSO paradigm. Illustrating this linkage between the heretofore distinct literatures of SOM and PSO opens up several new avenues of research for the development of novel self-organising algorithms.