Fast Most Similar Neighbor Classifier for Mixed Data.

The nearest neighbor (NN) classifier has been a widely used technique in pattern recognition because of its simplicity and good behavior. To decide the class of a new object, the NN classifier performs an exhaustive comparison between the object to classify and the training set T. However, when T is large, the exhaustive comparison is very expensive and sometimes becomes inapplicable. To avoid this problem, many fast NN algorithms have been developed for numerical object descriptions, most of them based on metric properties to avoid comparisons. However, in some sciences as Medicine, Geology, Sociology, etc., objects are usually described by numerical and non numerical attributes (mixed data). In this case, we can not assume the comparison function satisfies metric properties. Therefore, in this paper a fast most similar object classifier based on search methods suitable for mixed data is presented. Some experiments using standard databases and a comparison with other two fast NN methods are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]