Basic Tenets of Classification Algorithms K-Nearest-Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and Neural Network: A Review

Abstract

In this paper, sixty-eight research articles published between 2000 and 2017 as well as textbooks which employed four classification algorithms: K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and Neural Network (NN) as the main statistical tools were reviewed. The aim was to examine and compare these nonparametric classification methods on the following attributes: robustness to training data, sensitivity to changes, data fitting, stability, ability to handle large data sizes, sensitivity to noise, time invested in parameter tuning, and accuracy. The performances, strengths and shortcomings of each of the algorithms were examined, and finally, a conclusion was arrived at on which one has higher performance. It was evident from the literature reviewed that RF is too sensitive to small changes in the training dataset and is occasionally unstable and tends to overfit in the model. KNN is easy to implement and understand but has a major drawback of becoming significantly slow as the size of the data in use grows, while the ideal value of K for the KNN classifier is difficult to set. SVM and RF are insensitive to noise or overtraining, which shows their ability in dealing with unbalanced data. Larger input datasets will lengthen classification times for NN and KNN more than for SVM and RF. Among these nonparametric classification methods, NN has the potential to become a more widely used classification algorithm, but because of their time-consuming parameter tuning procedure, high level of complexity in computational processing, the numerous types of NN architectures to choose from and the high number of algorithms used for training, most researchers recommend SVM and RF as easier and wieldy used methods which repeatedly achieve results with high accuracies and are often faster to implement.