Biomedical images classification by universal nearest neighbours classifier using posterior probability

Author

D'Ambrosio, Roberto and Bel Haj Ali, Wafa and Nock, Richard and Soda, Paolo and Nielsen, Frank and Barlaud, Michel

Abstract

Universal Nearest Neighbours (unn) is a classifier recently proposed, which can also effectively estimates the posterior probability of each classification act. This algorithm, intrinsically binary, requires the use of a decomposition method to cope with multiclass problems, thus reducing their complexity in less complex binary subtasks. Then, a reconstruction rule provides the final classification. In this paper we show that the application of unn algorithm in conjunction with a reconstruction rule based on the posterior probabilities provides a classification scheme robust among different biomedical image datasets. To this aim, we compare unn performance with those achieved by Support Vector Machine with two different kernels and by a k Nearest Neighbours classifier, and applying two different reconstruction rules for each of the aforementioned classification paradigms. The results on one private and five public biomedical datasets show satisfactory performance.