Various Prototype Reduction Schemes (PRS) have been reported in the literature. Based on their operating characteristics, these schemes fall into two fairly distinct categories -those which are of a creative sort, and those which are essentially selective. The norms for evaluating these methods are typically, the reduction rate and the classification accuracy. It is generally believed that the former class of methods is superior to the latter.In this paper, we report the results of executing various creative PRS, and attempt to comparatively quantify their capabilities. The paper presents a brief taxonomy of the various reported PRS schemes. Our experimental results for three artificial data sets, and for samples involving real-life data sets, demonstrate that no single method is uniformly superior to the others for all kinds of applications. This result, though consistent with the findings of [2], is, in one sense, counter-intuitive, because the various researchers have presented their specific PRS with the hope that it would be superior to the previously reported methods. But the fact is that while one method is superior in certain domains, it is inferior to another method when dealing with a data set with markedly different characteristics. The conclusion of this study is that the question of determining when one method is superior to another remains open. Indeed, it appears as if the designers of the Pattern Recognition system will have to choose the appropriate PRS based to the specific characteristics of the data that they are studying. The paper also suggests answers to various hypotheses that relate to the accuracies and reduction rates of families of PRS.
ChemInform is a weekly Abstracting Service, delivering concise information at a glance that was extracted from about 100 leading journals. To access a ChemInform Abstract of an article which was published elsewhere, please select a “Full Text” option. The original article is trackable via the “References” option.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.