Md-knn: An Instance-based Approach for Multi-Dimensional Classification

Multi-dimensional classification (MDC) deals with the problem where each instance is associated with multiple class variables, each of which corresponds to a specific class space. One of the mainstream solutions for MDC is to adapt traditional machine learning techniques to deal with MDC data. In this paper, a first attempt towards adapting instance-based techniques for MDC is investigated, and a new approach named Md-knn is proposed. Specifically, Md-knn identifies unseen instance's $k$ nearest neighbors and obtains its corresponding $k\text{NN}$ counting statistics for each class space, based on which maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference is made for each pair of class spaces. After that, the class label w.r.t. each class space is determined by synergizing predictions from the learned classifiers via consulting empirical $k\text{NN}$ accuracy. Comparative studies over ten benchmark data sets clearly validate Md-knn's effectiveness.