A Novel Template Reduction Approach for the K-Nearest Neighbor Method

The K-nearest neighbor (KNN) rule is one of the most widely used pattern classification algorithms. For large data sets, the computational demands for classifying patterns using KNN can be prohibitive. A way to alleviate this problem is through the condensing approach. This means we remove patterns that are more of a computational burden but do not contribute to better classification accuracy. In this brief, we propose a new condensing algorithm. The proposed idea is based on defining the so-called chain. This is a sequence of nearest neighbors from alternating classes. We make the point that patterns further down the chain are close to the classification boundary and based on that we set a cutoff for the patterns we keep in the training set. Experiments show that the proposed approach effectively reduces the number of prototypes while maintaining the same level of classification accuracy as the traditional KNN. Moreover, it is a simple and a fast condensing algorithm.