NS-k-NN: Neutrosophic Set-Based k-Nearest Neighbors Classifier

k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), which is known to be a simple and efficient approach, is a non-parametric supervised classifier. It aims to determine the class label of an unknown sample by its k-nearest neighbors that are stored in a training set. The k-nearest neighbors are determined based on some distance functions. Although k-NN produces successful results, there have been some extensions for improving its precision. The neutrosophic set (NS) defines three memberships namely T, I and F. T, I, and F shows the truth membership degree, the false membership degree, and the indeterminacy membership degree, respectively. In this paper, the NS memberships are adopted to improve the classification performance of the k-NN classifier. A new straightforward k-NN approach is proposed based on NS theory. It calculates the NS memberships based on a supervised neutrosophic c-means (NCM) algorithm. A final belonging membership U is calculated from the NS triples as U = T + I − F. A similar final voting scheme as given in fuzzy k-NN is considered for class label determination. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed method’s performance. To this end, several toy and real-world datasets are used. We further compare the proposed method with k-NN, fuzzy k-NN, and two weighted k-NN schemes. The results are encouraging and the improvement is obvious.