Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Classification Using Support Vector Machines

The nearest neighbor technique is a simple and appealing method to address classification problems. It relies on the assumption of locally constant class conditional probabilities. This assumption becomes invalid in high dimensions with a finite number of examples dueto the curse of dimensionality. We propose a technique that computes a locally flexible metric by means of Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The maximum margin boundary found by the SVM is used to determine the most discriminant direction over the query's neighborhood. Such direction provides a local weighting scheme for input features.