Dynamic cluster formation using populations of spiking neurons

This paper introduces a novel neuro-dynamic system for adaptive online clustering using populations of spiking neurons and spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP). Real-valued data samples are temporally encoded into spike events, used by biological neurons to encode information and communicate with one another, and clusters are represented by spiking neuron populations of varying size. The number of clusters is unknown a priori and clusters are learned in an online fashion where each data sample is provided only once. The coincidence detection capability of spiking neurons is utilized for data clustering and clusters are dynamically formed. The structure of the spiking neural network is constantly adjusted through adding and pruning of neuron populations. Besides, the number of neurons within each population constantly adapts as new data arrives. STDP is employed to adjust the strength of synaptic connections and enhance the selectivity of each population to its corresponding group of data. Preliminary experiments were carried out on synthetic and selected benchmark datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. Promising results were obtained, which indicate the viability of spike-based population coding for online data clustering.