Granular Bidirectional and Multidirectional Associative Memories: Towards a Collaborative Buildup of Granular Mappings

Associative and bidirectional associative memories are examples of associative structures studied intensively in the literature. The underlying idea is to realize associative mapping so that the recall processes (one-directional and bidirectional ones) are realized with minimal recall errors. Associative and fuzzy associative memories have been studied in numerous areas yielding efficient applications for image recall and enhancements and fuzzy controllers, which can be regarded as one-directional associative memories. In this study, we revisit and augment the concept of associative memories by offering some new design insights where the corresponding mappings are realized on the basis of a related collection of landmarks (prototypes) over which an associative mapping becomes spanned. In light of the bidirectional character of mappings, we have developed an augmentation of the existing fuzzy clustering (fuzzy c-means, FCM) in the form of a so-called collaborative fuzzy clustering. Here, an interaction in the formation of prototypes is optimized so that the bidirectional recall errors can be minimized. Furthermore, we generalized the mapping into its granular version in which numeric prototypes that are formed through the clustering process are made granular so that the quality of the recall can be quantified. We propose several scenarios in which the allocation of information granularity is aimed at the optimization of the characteristics of recalled results (information granules) that are quantified in terms of coverage and specificity. We also introduce various architectural augmentations of the associative structures.