Nearest neighbor editing aided by unlabeled data

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method for nearest neighbor editing. Nearest neighbor editing aims to increase the classifier’s generalization ability by removing noisy instances from the training set. Traditionally nearest neighbor editing edits (removes/retains) each instance by the voting of the instances in the training set (labeled instances). However, motivated by semi-supervised learning, we propose a novel editing methodology which edits each training instance by the voting of all the available instances (both labeled and unlabeled instances). We expect that the editing performance could be boosted by appropriately using unlabeled data. Our idea relies on the fact that in many applications, in addition to the training instances, many unlabeled instances are also available since they do not need human annotation effort. Three popular data editing methods, including edited nearest neighbor, repeated edited nearest neighbor and All k-NN are adopted to verify our idea. They are tested on a set of UCI data sets. Experimental results indicate that all the three editing methods can achieve improved performance with the aid of unlabeled data. Moreover, the improvement is more remarkable when the ratio of training data to unlabeled data is small.