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An adaptive nearest neighbor rule for classification
Akshay Balsubramani · Sanjoy Dasgupta · yoav Freund · Shay Moran

Wed Dec 11 04:45 PM -- 04:50 PM (PST) @ West Exhibition Hall C + B3
in Track 1 Session 4 »
We introduce a variant of the $k$-nearest neighbor classifier in which $k$ is chosen adaptively for each query, rather than supplied as a parameter. The choice of $k$ depends on properties of each neighborhood, and therefore may significantly vary between different points. (For example, the algorithm will use larger $k$ for predicting the labels of points in noisy regions.) We provide theory and experiments that demonstrate that the algorithm performs comparably to, and sometimes better than, $k$-NN with an optimal choice of $k$. In particular, we derive bounds on the convergence rates of our classifier that depend on a local quantity we call the ``advantage'' which is significantly weaker than the Lipschitz conditions used in previous convergence rate proofs. These generalization bounds hinge on a variant of the seminal Uniform Convergence Theorem due to Vapnik and Chervonenkis; this variant concerns conditional probabilities and may be of independent interest.
[ Paper]  [ Slides]  [ Slides] 

Author Information

Akshay Balsubramani (Stanford)
Sanjoy Dasgupta (UC San Diego)
yoav Freund (UCSD)
Shay Moran (Google AI Princeton)

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