Scalable approximate FRNN-OWA classification

Fuzzy Rough Nearest Neighbour classification with Ordered Weighted Averaging operators (FRNN-OWA) is an algorithm that classifies unseen instances according to their membership in the fuzzy upper and lower approximations of the decision classes. Previous research has shown that the use of OWA operators increases the robustness of this model. However, calculating membership in an approximation requires a nearest neighbour search. In practice, the query time complexity of exact nearest neighbour search algorithms in more than a handful of dimensions is near-linear, which limits the scalability of FRNN-OWA. Therefore, we propose approximate FRNN-OWA, a modified model that calculates upper and lower approximations of decision classes using the approximate nearest neighbours returned by Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW), a recent approximative nearest neighbour search algorithm with logarithmic query time complexity at constant near-100% accuracy. We demonstrate that approximate FRNN-OWA is sufficiently robust to match the classification accuracy of exact FRNN-OWA while scaling much more efficiently. We test four parameter configurations of HNSW, and evaluate their performance by measuring classification accuracy and construction and query times for samples of various sizes from three large datasets. We find that with two of the parameter configurations, approximate FRNN-OWA achieves near-identical accuracy to exact FRNN-OWA for most sample sizes within query times that are up to several orders of magnitude faster

Approximations from Anywhere and General Rough Sets

Not all approximations arise from information systems. The problem of fitting approximations, subjected to some rules (and related data), to information systems in a rough scheme of things is known as the \emph{inverse problem}. The inverse problem is more general than the duality (or abstract representation) problems and was introduced by the present author in her earlier papers. From the practical perspective, a few (as opposed to one) theoretical frameworks may be suitable for formulating the problem itself. \emph{Granular operator spaces} have been recently introduced and investigated by the present author in her recent work in the context of antichain based and dialectical semantics for general rough sets. The nature of the inverse problem is examined from number-theoretic and combinatorial perspectives in a higher order variant of granular operator spaces and some necessary conditions are proved. The results and the novel approach would be useful in a number of unsupervised and semi supervised learning contexts and algorithms.Comment: 20 Pages. Scheduled to appear in IJCRS'2017 LNCS Proceedings, Springe