A fast prototype reduction method based on template reduction and visualization-induced self-organizing map for nearest neighbor algorithm

The k nearest neighbor is a lazy learning algorithm that is inefficient in the classification phase because it needs to compare the query sample with all training samples. A template reduction method is recently proposed that uses only samples near the decision boundary for classification and removes those far from the decision boundary. However, when class distributions overlap, more border samples are retrained and it leads to inefficient performance in the classification phase. Because the number of reduced samples are limited, using an appropriate feature reduction method seems a logical choice to improve classification time. This paper proposes a new prototype reduction method for the k nearest neighbor algorithm, and it is based on template reduction and ViSOM. The potential property of ViSOM is displaying the topology of data on a two-dimensional feature map, it provides an intuitive way for users to observe and analyze data. An efficient classification framework is then presented, which combines the feature reduction method and the prototype selection algorithm. It needs a very small data size for classification while keeping recognition rate. In the experiments, both of synthetic and real datasets are used to evaluate the performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains above 70 % speedup ratio and 90 % compression ratio while maintaining similar performance to kNN.