AISTATS 2015poster53 citations

A Bayes consistent 1-NN classifier

Aryeh Kontorovich, Roi Weiss

Abstract

We show that a simple modification of the 1-nearest neighbor classifier yields a strongly Bayes consistent learner. Prior to this work, the only strongly Bayes consistent proximity-based method was the k-nearest neighbor classifier, for k growing appropriately with sample size. We will argue that a margin-regularized 1-NN enjoys considerable statistical and algorithmic advantages over the k-NN classifier. These include user-friendly finite-sample error bounds, as well as time- and memory-efficient learning and test-point evaluation algorithms with a principled speed-accuracy tradeoff. Encouraging empirical results are reported.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v38-kontorovich15,
  title = 	 {{A Bayes consistent 1-NN classifier}},
  author = 	 {Kontorovich, Aryeh and Weiss, Roi},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = 	 {480--488},
  year = 	 {2015},
  editor = 	 {Lebanon, Guy and Vishwanathan, S. V. N.},
  volume = 	 {38},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  address = 	 {San Diego, California, USA},
  month = 	 {09--12 May},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v38/kontorovich15.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v38/kontorovich15.html},
  abstract = 	 {We show that a simple modification of the 1-nearest neighbor classifier yields a strongly Bayes consistent learner. Prior to this work, the only strongly Bayes consistent proximity-based method was the k-nearest neighbor classifier, for k growing appropriately with sample size. We will argue that a margin-regularized 1-NN enjoys considerable statistical and algorithmic advantages over the k-NN classifier. These include user-friendly finite-sample error bounds, as well as time- and memory-efficient learning and test-point evaluation algorithms with a principled speed-accuracy tradeoff. Encouraging empirical results are reported.}
}
A Bayes consistent 1-NN classifier · AISTATS 2015