Challenges in KNN Classification

Shichao Zhang

Abstract: The KNN algorithm is one of the most popular data mining algorithms. It has been widely and successfully applied to data analysis applications across a variety of research topics in computer science. This paper illustrates that, despite its success, there remain many challenges in KNN classification, including K computation, nearest neighbor selection, nearest neighbor search and classification rules. Having established these issues, recent approaches to their resolution are examined in more detail, thereby providing a potential roadmap for ongoing KNN-related research, as well as some new classification rules regarding how to tackle the issue of training sample imbalance. To evaluate the proposed approaches, some experiments were conducted with 15 UCI benchmark datasets.