Hubness-based fuzzy measures for high-dimensional k-nearest neighbor classification

Most data of interest today in data-mining applications is complex and is usually represented by many different features. Such high-dimensional data is by its very nature often quite difficult to handle by conventional machine-learning algorithms. This is considered to be an aspect of the well known curse of dimensionality. Consequently, high-dimensional data needs to be processed with care, which is why the design of machine-learning algorithms needs to take these factors into account. Furthermore, it was observed that some of the arising high-dimensional properties could in fact be exploited in improving overall algorithm design. One such phenomenon, related to nearest-neighbor learning methods, is known as hubness and refers to the emergence of very influential nodes (hubs) in k-nearest neighbor graphs. A crisp weighted voting scheme for the k-nearest neighbor classifier has recently been proposed which exploits this notion. In this paper we go a step further by embracing the soft approach, and propose several fuzzy measures for k-nearest neighbor classification, all based on hubness, which express fuzziness of elements appearing in k-neighborhoods of other points. Experimental evaluation on real data from the UCI repository and the image domain suggests that the fuzzy approach provides a useful measure of confidence in the predicted labels, resulting in improvement over the crisp weighted method, as well as the standard kNN classifier.