Adaptive, Hubness-Aware Nearest Neighbour Classifier with Application to Hyperspectral Data

We present an extension of the Nearest Neighbour classifier that can adapt to sample imbalances in local regions of the dataset. Our approach uses the hubness statistic as a measure of a relation between new samples and the existing training set. This allows to estimate the upper limit of neighbours that vote for the label of the new instance. This estimation improves the classifier performance in situations where some classes are locally under-represented. The main focus of our method is to solve the problem of local undersampling that exists in hyperspectral data classification. Using several well-known Machine Learning and hyperspectral datasets, we show that our approach outperforms standard and distance-weighted kNN, especially for high values of k.