Abstract

The k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) pattern classifier is a simple yet effective learner. However, it has a few drawbacks, one of which is the large model size. There are a number of algorithms that are able to condense the model size of the k-NN classifier at the expense of accuracy. Boosting is therefore desirable for increasing the accuracy of these condensed models. Unfortunately, there does not exist a boosting algorithm that works well with k-NN directly. We present a direct boosting algorithm for the k-NN classifier that creates an ensemble of models with locally modified distance weighting. An empirical study conducted on 10 standard databases from the UCI repository shows that this new Boosted k-NN algorithm has increased generalization accuracy in the majority of the datasets and never performs worse than standard k-NN.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

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