Using a genetic algorithm for editing k-nearest neighbor classifiers

The edited k-nearest neighbor consists of the application of the k-nearest neighbor classifier with an edited training set, in order to reduce the classification error rate. This edited training set is a subset of the complete training set in which some of the training patterns are excluded. In recent works, genetic algorithms have been successfully applied to generate edited sets. In this paper we propose three improvements of the edited k-nearest neighbor design using genetic algorithms: the use of a mean square error based objective function, the implementation of a clustered crossover, and a fast smart mutation scheme. Results achieved using the breast cancer database and the diabetes database from the UCI machine learning benchmark repository demonstrate the improvement achieved by the joint use of these three proposals.