Stabilized Nearest Neighbor Classifier and its Statistical Properties
提出一种稳定化最近邻分类器（SNN），通过最小化分类不稳定性指标来降低预测的抽样变异性，理论证明其达到最优收敛速度，实际表现优于现有方法。
The stability of statistical analysis is an important indicator for reproducibility, which is one main principle of the scientific method. It entails that similar statistical conclusions can be reached based on independent samples from the same underlying population. In this article, we introduce a general measure of classification instability (CIS) to quantify the sampling variability of the prediction made by a classification method. Interestingly, the asymptotic CIS of any weighted nearest neighbor classifier turns out to be proportional to the Euclidean norm of its weight vector. Based on this concise form, we propose a stabilized nearest neighbor (SNN) classifier, which distinguishes itself from other nearest neighbor classifiers, by taking the stability into consideration. In theory, we prove that SNN attains the minimax optimal convergence rate in risk, and a sharp convergence rate in CIS. The latter rate result is established for general plug-in classifiers under a low-noise condition. Extensive simulated and real examples demonstrate that SNN achieves a considerable improvement in CIS over existing nearest neighbor classifiers, with comparable classification accuracy. We implement the algorithm in a publicly available R package snn. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.