DataGrinder: Fast, Accurate, Fully non-Parametric Classification Approach Using 2D Convex Hulls

TL;DR

DataGrinder introduces a fast, deterministic, non-parametric classification method using 2D convex hulls that achieves high accuracy and scalability, suitable for large datasets and parallel processing.

Contribution

It presents a novel O(n) convex hull-based classification algorithm that is fully deterministic and scalable, differing from probabilistic and sampling-based methods.

Findings

Competitive accuracy compared to existing classifiers

Linear expected running time for convex hull computation

Effective scalability for large datasets

Abstract

It has been a long time, since data mining technologies have made their ways to the field of data management. Classification is one of the most important data mining tasks for label prediction, categorization of objects into groups, advertisement and data management. In this paper, we focus on the standard classification problem which is predicting unknown labels in Euclidean space. Most efforts in Machine Learning communities are devoted to methods that use probabilistic algorithms which are heavy on Calculus and Linear Algebra. Most of these techniques have scalability issues for big data, and are hardly parallelizable if they are to maintain their high accuracies in their standard form. Sampling is a new direction for improving scalability, using many small parallel classifiers. In this paper, rather than conventional sampling methods, we focus on a discrete classification algorithm with O(n) expected running time. Our approach performs a similar task as sampling methods. However, we use column-wise sampling of data, rather than the row-wise sampling used in the literature. In either case, our algorithm is completely deterministic. Our algorithm, proposes a way of combining 2D convex hulls in order to achieve high classification accuracy as well as scalability in the same time. First, we thoroughly describe and prove our O(n) algorithm for finding the convex hull of a point set in 2D. Then, we show with experiments our classifier model built based on this idea is very competitive compared with existing sophisticated classification algorithms included in commercial statistical applications such as MATLAB.