On rival penalization controlled competitive learning for clustering with automatic cluster number selection Yiu-ming Cheung   View Paper (PDF)   Return to November 2005, Volume 17, Issue 11 Abstract The existing rival penalized competitive learning (RPCL) algorithm and its variants have provided an attractive way to perform data clustering without knowing the exact number of clusters. However, their performance is sensitive to the preselection of the rival delearning rate. In this paper, we further investigate the RPCL and present a mechanism to control the strength of rival penalization dynamically. Consequently, we propose the rival penalization controlled competitive learning (RPCCL) algorithm and its stochastic version. In each of these algorithms, the selection of the delearning rate is circumvented using a novel technique. We compare the performance of RPCCL to RPCL in Gaussian mixture clustering and color image segmentation, respectively. The experiments have produced the promising results. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery