Learning Rule Optimization and Comparative Evaluation of Accelerated Self-Organizing Maps for Industrial Applications

The emergence of low latency and high bandwidth 5G networks, alongside localized computation and data storage of edge computing are enabling real-time applications in industrial settings, such as smart grid, smart cities, and smart factories. The resolution, frequency and variety of data streams generated by such applications are not effectively processed and analysed by contemporary machine learning algorithms. This challenge is further complicated by the unlabelled and non-deterministic nature of the data streams. Hardware accelerated machine learning has been proposed to address some of these challenges but limited work has been published on unsupervised learning from unlabelled data. In this paper, we extend the hardware accelerated Self Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm by optimizing the learning rule for computational efficiency, followed by a comparative empirical evaluation with two other variants, tri-state SOM and integer SOM. We have used two datasets representative of real-time industrial applications in 5G networks and smart grids, for this evaluation.