A Binary Correlation Matrix Memory k-NN Classifier with Hardware Implementation

Abstract

This paper describes a generic and fast classifier that uses a binary CMM (Correlation Matrix Memory) neural network for storing and matching a large amount of patterns efficiently, and a k-NN rule for classification. To meet CMM input requirements, a robust encoding method is proposed to convert numerical inputs into binary ones with the maximally achievable uniformity. To reduce the execution bottleneck, a hardware implementation of the CMM is described, which shows the network with on-board training and testing operates at over 200 times the speed of a current mid-range workstation, and is scaleable to very large problems. The CMM classifier has been tested on several benchmarks and, comparing with a simple k-NN classifier, it gave less than 1% lower accuracy and over 4 and 12 times speed-ups in software and hardware respectively.