The Design of a Nearest - Neighbor

The nearest neighbor (NN) approach is a powerful nonparametric technique for pattern classiication tasks. In this paper, algorithms for prototype reduction , hierarchical prototype organization and fast NN search are described. To remove redundant category prototypes and to avoid redundant comparisons, the algorithms exploit geometrical information of a given prototype set which is represented approximately by computing k-nearest/farthest neighbors of each prototype. The performance of a NN classiier using those algorithms for Japanese character recognition is reported .