Patent US 6,732,083

A computer-based system computes a probabilistic bound on the error probability of a nearest neighbor classifier as follows. A subset of the examples in the classifier is used to form a reduced classifier. The error frequency of the reduced classifier on the remaining examples is computed as a baseline estimate of the error probability for the original classifier. Additionally, subsets of the examples outside the reduced classifier are combined with the reduced classifier and applied to the remaining examples in order to estimate the difference in error probability for the reduced classifier and error probability for the original classifier.