Data classification combining Self-Organizing Maps and Informative Nearest Neighbor

The task of classifying data has been addressed in various works, and has been utilized in various areas of application, such as medicine, industry, marketing, financial market and many others. This work will present a data classifier proposal that combines the SOM (Self-Organizing Map) neural network with INN (Informative Nearest Neighbors). The combination of these two algorithms will be called in this work as SOM-INN. The classification will be done in a two steps task: in the first the SOM has a functionality to reduce the dataset through a process that utilizes the winning neuron concept and, in the second step, the dataset objects selected will be utilized as reference for the INN algorithm to decide about the classification utilizing the most informative object of the reduced dataset. Experiments using 14 public datasets will be made comparing classic classification algorithms from the indicators of accuracy and time consumed in the classification process. The results obtained show that the proposed SOM-INN algorithm, when compared with the other classifiers, presents better accuracy rates in databases where the border region does not have the object classes well distributed. However, its main differential is in the classification time, which is extremely important for real applications.