On Competitiveness of Nearest-Neighbor Based Music Classification: A Methodological Critique
Résumé
The traditional role of nearest-neighbor classification in music
classification research is that of a straw man opponent for the learning
approach of the hour. Recent work in high-dimensional indexing
has shown that approximate nearest-neighbor algorithms are extremely
scalable, yielding results of reasonable quality from billions of high-dimensional
features. With such efficient large-scale classifiers, the traditional
music classification methodology of reducing both feature dimensionality
and feature quantity is incorrect; instead the approximate
nearest-neighbor classifier should be given an extensive data collection
to work with. We present a case study, using a well-known MIR classification
benchmark with well-known music features, which shows that
a simple nearest-neighbor classifier performs very competitively when
given ample data. In this position paper, we therefore argue that nearest-neighbor
classification has been treated unfairly in the literature and may
be much more competitive than previously thought.