Bayesian network classifiers versus selective k-NN classifier

In this paper Bayesian network classifiers are compared to the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classifier, which is based on a subset of features. This subset is established by means of sequential feature selection methods. Experimental results on classifying data of a surface inspection task and data sets from the UCI repository show that Bayesian network classifiers are competitive with selective k-NN classifiers concerning classification accuracy. The k-NN classifier performs well in the case where the number of samples for learning the parameters of the Bayesian network is small. Bayesian network classifiers outperform selective k-NN methods in terms of memory requirements and computational demands. This paper demonstrates the strength of Bayesian networks for classification. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.