Creative prototype reduction schemes: a taxonomy and ranking

Various prototype reduction schemes (PRS) have been reported in the literature. Based on their operating characteristics, these schemes fall into two fairly distinct categories-those which are of a creative sort, and those which are essentially selective. The norms for evaluating these methods are typically, the reduction rate and the classification accuracy. It is generally believed that the former class of methods is superior to the latter. We report the results of executing various creative PRS and attempt to comparatively quantity their capabilities. The paper presents a brief taxonomy of the various reported PRS schemes. Our experimental results for three artificial data sets, and for samples involving real-life data sets, demonstrate that no single method is uniformly superior to the others for all kinds of applications. The conclusion of this study is that the question of determining when one method is superior to another remains open, and depends on the specific characteristics of the data that they are studying. The paper also suggests answers to various hypotheses that relate to the accuracies and reduction rates of families of PRS.