A regression model based on the nearest centroid neighborhood

Abstract

The renowned k-nearest neighbor decision rule is widely used for classification tasks, where the label of any new sample is estimated based on a similarity criterion defined by an appropriate distance function. It has also been used successfully for regression problems where the purpose is to predict a continuous numeric label. However, some alternative neighborhood definitions, such as the surrounding neighborhood, have considered that the neighbors should fulfill not only the proximity property, but also a spatial location criterion. In this paper, we explore the use of the k-nearest centroid neighbor rule, which is based on the concept of surrounding neighborhood, for regression problems. Two support vector regression models were executed as reference. Experimentation over a wide collection of real-world data sets and using fifteen odd different values of k demonstrates that the regression algorithm based on the surrounding neighborhood significantly outperforms the traditional k-nearest neighborhood method and also a support vector regression model with a RBF kernel.