Quality, frequency and similarity based fuzzy nearest neighbor classification

This paper proposes an approach based on fuzzy rough set theory to improve nearest neighbor based classification. Six measures are introduced to evaluate the quality of the nearest neighbors. This quality is combined with the frequency at which classes occur among the nearest neighbors and the similarity w.r.t. the nearest neighbor, to decide which class to pick among the neighbor´s classes. The importance of each aspect is weighted using optimized weights. An experimental study shows that our method, Quality, Frequency and Similarity based Fuzzy Nearest Neighbor (QFSNN), outperforms state-of-the-art nearest neighbor classifiers.