Noise-enhanced clustering and competitive learning algorithms

Noise can provably speed up convergence in many centroid-based clustering algorithms. This includes the popular kk-means clustering algorithm. The clustering noise benefit follows from the general noise benefit for the expectation–maximization algorithm because many clustering algorithms are special cases of the expectation–maximization algorithm. Simulations show that noise also speeds up convergence in stochastic unsupervised competitive learning, supervised competitive learning, and differential competitive learning.