Usage of self-organizing neural networks in evaluation of consumer behaviour

• Main Authors: Jana Weinlichová, Jiří Fejfar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Mendel University Press 2010-01-01
• Series: Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis
• Subjects: behaviour of consumers; Neural networks; Kohonen map; semi-supervised learning; label propagation; self-training
• Online Access: https://acta.mendelu.cz/58/6/0625/

This article deals with evaluation of consumer data by Artificial Intelligence methods. In methodical part there are described learning algorithms for Kohonen maps on the principle of supervised learning, unsupervised learning and semi-supervised learning. The principles of supervised learning and unsupervised learning are compared. On base of binding conditions of these principles there is pointed out an advantage of semi-supervised learning. Three algorithms are described for the semi-supervised learning: label propagation, self-training and co-training. Especially usage of co-training in Kohonen map learning seems to be promising point of other research. In concrete application of Kohonen neural network on consumer’s expense the unsupervised learning method has been chosen – the self-organization. So the features of data are evaluated by clustering method called Kohonen maps. These input data represents consumer expenses of households in countries of European union and are characterised by 12-dimension vector according to commodity classification. The data are evaluated in several years, so we can see their distribution, similarity or dissimilarity and also their evolution. In the article we discus other usage of this method for this type of data and also comparison of our results with results reached by hierarchical cluster analysis.