Fuzzy-belief K-nearest neighbor classifier for uncertain data

Information fusion technique like evidence theory has been widely applied in the data classification to improve the performance of classifier. A new fuzzy-belief K-nearest neighbor (FBK-NN) classifier is proposed based on evidential reasoning for dealing with uncertain data. In FBK-NN, each labeled sample is assigned with a fuzzy membership to each class according to its neighborhood. For each input object to classify, K basic belief assignments (BBA's) are determined from the distances between the object and its K nearest neighbors taking into account the neighbors' memberships. The K BBA's are fused by a new method and the fusion results are used to finally decide the class of the query object. FBK-NN method works with credal classification and discriminate specific classes, meta-classes and ignorant class. Meta-classes are defined by disjunction of several specific classes and they allow to well model the partial imprecision of classification of the objects. The introduction of meta-classes in the classification procedure reduces the misclassification errors. The ignorant class is employed for outliers detections. The effectiveness of FBK-NN is illustrated through several experiments with a comparative analysis with respect to other classical methods.