  The k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) classification approach is conceptually simple -
yet widely applied since it often performs well in practical applications.
However, using a global constant k does not always provide an optimal solution,
e.g., for datasets with an irregular density distribution of data points. This
paper proposes an adaptive kNN classifier where k is chosen dynamically for
each instance (point) to be classified, such that the expected accuracy of
classification is maximized. We define the expected accuracy as the accuracy of
a set of structurally similar observations. An arbitrary similarity function
can be used to find these observations. We introduce and evaluate different
similarity functions. For the evaluation, we use five different classification
tasks based on geo-spatial data. Each classification task consists of (tens of)
thousands of items. We demonstrate, that the presented expected accuracy
measures can be a good estimator for kNN performance, and the proposed adaptive
kNN classifier outperforms common kNN and previously introduced adaptive kNN
algorithms. Also, we show that the range of considered k can be significantly
reduced to speed up the algorithm without negative influence on classification
accuracy.
