MNIST Dataset Classification Utilizing k-NN Classifier with Modified Sliding Window Metric

The MNIST dataset of the handwritten digits is known as one of the commonly used datasets for machine learning and computer vision research. We aim a widely applicable classification problem and apply a simple but still efficient K-nearest neighbor classifier with an enhanced heuristic. We evaluate the performance of the K-nearest neighbor classification algorithm on the MNIST dataset where the L2 Euclidean distance metric is compared to a modified distance metric which utilizes the sliding window technique in order to avoid performance degradation due to slight spatial misalignment. Accuracy metric and confusion matrices are used as the performance indicators to compare the performance of the baseline algorithm versus the enhanced sliding window method and results show significant improvement using this simple method.