Interpretable Locally Adaptive Nearest Neighbors

When training automated systems, it has been shown to be beneficial to adapt the representation of data by learning a problem-specific metric. This metric is global. We extend this idea and, for the widely used family of k nearest neighbors algorithms, develop a method that allows learning locally adaptive metrics. These local metrics not only improve performance, but are naturally interpretable. To demonstrate important aspects of how our approach works, we conduct a number of experiments on synthetic data sets, and we show its usefulness on real-world benchmark data sets. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

To improve the performance of automated systems, we have developed a method that allows learning locally adaptive metrics in the k nearest neighbors algorithm, making it more effective and interpretable in real-world applications.