Isochronous Temporal Metric for Neighbourhood Analysis in Classification Tasks

Machine learning, classification, and clustering techniques use the distance functions to evaluate the proximity between data entries and deduce the best neighbouring element and the closest matching entry. The best neighbour is not only the closest neighbour but a neighbour that is quick to respond. In view of that, a time-based isochronous metric is introduced to evaluate the best neighbours and form linkages by grouping similar entities. The proposed method uses parametric equations of the fastest descent and solves the time variables for attributes localised in curved space–time. The time metric is compared with commonly used distance metrics for accuracy in classification and clustering using benchmark and commonly used datasets. The nearest-neighbour technique is used for evaluating classification accuracy, and an adjusted random index (ARI) is used to evaluate clustering. The proposed method shows better accuracy and ARI in comparison to distance functions. It also assigns better weights to attributes of the dataset and easily identifies repeated patterns in noisy time series data.