Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 (NIPS 2001)
Carlotta Domeniconi, Dimitrios Gunopulos
The nearest neighbor technique is a simple and appealing method to address classification problems. It relies on t he assumption of locally constant class conditional probabilities. This assumption becomes invalid in high dimensions with a finite number of exam(cid:173) ples due to the curse of dimensionality. We propose a technique that computes a locally flexible metric by means of Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The maximum margin boundary found by the SVM is used to determine the most discriminant direction over the query's neighborhood. Such direction provides a local weighting scheme for input features. We present experimental evidence of classification performance improvement over the SVM algorithm alone and over a variety of adaptive learning schemes, by using both simulated and real data sets.