Validation approaches for a biological model generation describing visitor behaviours in a cultural heritage scenario

In this paper we propose a biologically inspired mathematical model to simulate the personalized interactions of users with cultural heritage objects. The main idea is to measure the interests of a spectator w.r.t. an artwork by means of a model able to describe the behaviour dynamics. In this approach, the user is assimilated to a computational neuron, and its interests are deduced by counting potential spike trains, generated by external currents. The key idea of this paper consists in comparing a strengthened validation approach for neural networks based on classification with our novel proposal based on clustering; indeed, clustering allows to discover natural groups in the data, which are used to verify the neuronal response and to tune the computational model. Preliminary experimental results, based on a phantom database and obtained from a real world scenario, are shown. They underline the accuracy improvements achieved by the clustering-based approach in supporting the tuning of the model parameters. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.