Clustering Research Papers Using Genetic Algorithm Optimized Self-Organizing Maps

With the huge amount of published research papers, retrieving relevant information is a difficult task for any researcher. Effective clustering algorithms can help improve and simplify the retrieval process. Here, we propose an approach for automatic clustering for text document using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM). It is one of unsupervised artificial neural network that widely used for data analysis, data compression, clustering, and data mining. The quality and accuracy of a SOM algorithm depends on the selection of values for some of its parameters which are its initial learning rate, SOM matrix dimensions, and the number of iterations. Best values are typically selected using trial and error; however, in the current paper we suggest a more systematic approach to parameters optimization using the genetic algorithm. The proposed method is applied to cluster 3 scientific papers datasets using their keywords. Similar research papers were mapped closer to each other. Clustering results were validated using the Dunn index.