Genetic Algorithm to Optimize k-Nearest Neighbor Parameter for Benchmarked Medical Datasets Classification

Computer assisted medical diagnosis is a major machine learning problem being researched recently. General classifiers learn from the data itself through training process, due to the inexperience of an expert in determining parameters. This research proposes a methodology based on machine learning paradigm. Integrates the search heuristic that is inspired by natural evolution called genetic algorithm with the simplest and the most used learning algorithm, k-nearest Neighbor. The genetic algorithm were used for feature selection and parameter optimization while k-nearest Neighbor were used as a classifier. The proposed method is experimented on five benchmarked medical datasets from University California Irvine Machine Learning Repository and compared with original k-NN and other feature selection algorithm i.e., forward selection, backward elimination and greedy feature selection.  Experiment results show that the proposed method is able to achieve good performance with significant improvement with p value of t-Test is 0.0011.