Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27 (NIPS 2014)
Lee-Ad Gottlieb, Aryeh Kontorovich, Pinhas Nisnevitch
We present the first sample compression algorithm for nearest neighbors with non-trivial performance guarantees. We complement these guarantees by demonstrating almost matching hardness lower bounds, which show that our bound is nearly optimal. Our result yields new insight into margin-based nearest neighbor classification in metric spaces and allows us to significantly sharpen and simplify existing bounds. Some encouraging empirical results are also presented.