On the study of nearest neighbor algorithms for prevalence estimation in binary problems

This paper presents a new approach for solving binary quantification problems based on nearest neighbor (NN) algorithms. Our main objective is to study the behavior of these methods in the context of prevalence estimation. We seek for NN-based quantifiers able to provide competitive performance while balancing simplicity and effectiveness. We propose two simple weighting strategies, PWK and PWK α , which stand out among state-of-the-art quantifiers. These proposed methods are the only ones that offer statistical differences with respect to less robust algorithms, like CC or AC. The second contribution of the paper is to introduce a new experiment methodology for quantification.