Clustering unlabeled data with SOMs improves classification of labeled real-world data

We show the use of a self organizing map to cluster unlabeled data and to infer possible labelings from the clusters. Our inferred labels are presented to a multilayer perceptron along with labeled data, performance is improved over using only the labeled data. Results are presented for a number of popular real-world benchmark problems from domains other than text. This shows one way in which unlabeled data can be used to enhance supervised learning in a general-purpose neural network.