Classifying With Adaptive Hyper-Spheres: An Incremental Classifier Based on Competitive Learning

Abstract

Nowadays, datasets are always dynamic and patterns in them are changing. Instances with different labels are intertwined and often linearly inseparable, which bring new challenges to traditional learning algorithms. This paper proposes adaptive hyper-sphere (AdaHS), an adaptive incremental classifier, and its kernelized version: Nys-AdaHS. The classifier incorporates competitive training with a border zone. With adaptive hidden layer and tunable radii of hyper-spheres, AdaHS has strong capability of local learning like instance-based algorithms, but free from slow searching speed and excessive memory consumption. The experiments showed that AdaHS is robust, adaptive, and highly accurate. It is especially suitable for dynamic data in which patterns are changing, decision borders are complicated, and instances with the same label can be spherically clustered.