Instance Based Learning Revisited: Feature Weighting and its Applications

Instance based learning algorithm is the best known lazy learner and has been successfully used in many areas such as pattern analysis, medical analysis, bioinformatics and internet applications. However, its feature weighting scheme is too naive that many other extensions are proposed. Our version of IB3 named as eXtended IBL (XIBL) improves feature weighting scheme by backward stepwise regression and its distance function by VDM family that avoids overestimating discrete valued attributes. Also, XIBL adopts leave-one-out as its noise filtering scheme. Experiments with common artificial domains show that XIBL is better than the original IBL in terms of accuracy and noise tolerance. XIBL is applied to two important applications - intrusion detection and spam mail filtering and the results are promising.