Dynamic Feature Scaling for K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm
This addresses a specific issue in machine learning for practitioners using KNN, but it is incremental as it builds on existing scaling techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of scale-variant distance metrics in K-Nearest Neighbors by proposing a dynamic feature scaling method that assigns weights to individual features based on out-of-bag errors from decision trees, resulting in improved accuracy.
Nearest Neighbors Algorithm is a Lazy Learning Algorithm, in which the algorithm tries to approximate the predictions with the help of similar existing vectors in the training dataset. The predictions made by the K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm is based on averaging the target values of the spatial neighbors. The selection process for neighbors in the Hermitian space is done with the help of distance metrics such as Euclidean distance, Minkowski distance, Mahalanobis distance etc. A majority of the metrics such as Euclidean distance are scale variant, meaning that the results could vary for different range of values used for the features. Standard techniques used for the normalization of scaling factors are feature scaling method such as Z-score normalization technique, Min-Max scaling etc. Scaling methods uniformly assign equal weights to all the features, which might result in a non-ideal situation. This paper proposes a novel method to assign weights to individual feature with the help of out of bag errors obtained from constructing multiple decision tree models.