Z Distance Function for KNN Classification

This paper proposes a new distance metric function, called Z distance, for KNN classification. The Z distance function is not a geometric direct-line distance between two data points. It gives a consideration to the class attribute of a training dataset when measuring the affinity between data points. Concretely speaking, the Z distance of two data points includes their class center distance and real distance. And its shape looks like "Z". In this way, the affinity of two data points in the same class is always stronger than that in different classes. Or, the intraclass data points are always closer than those interclass data points. We evaluated the Z distance with experiments, and demonstrated that the proposed distance function achieved better performance in KNN classification.