Technological advancement led to the development of tools to collect vast amounts of data usually recorded at temporal stamps or arriving over time, e.g. data from sensors. Common ways of analysing this kind of data also involve supervised classification techniques; however, despite constant improvements in the literature, learning from high-dimensional data is always a challenging task due to many issues such as, for example, dealing with the curse of dimensionality and looking for a trade-off between complexity and accuracy. Nowadays, research in functional data analysis (FDA) and statistical learning is very lively to address these drawbacks adequately. This study offers a supervised classification strategy that combines FDA and tree-based procedures. Specifically, we introduce functional classification trees, functional bagging, and functional random forest exploiting the functional principal components decomposition as a tool to extract new features and build functional classifiers. In addition, we introduce new tools to support the understanding of the classification rules, such as the functional empirical separation prototype, functional predicted separation prototype, and the leaves’ functional deviance. Furthermore, we suggest some possible solutions for choosing the number of functional principal components and functional classification trees to be implemented in the supervised classification procedure. This research aims to provide an approach to improve the accuracy of the functional classifier, serve the interpretation of the functional classification rules, and overcome the classical drawbacks due to the high-dimensionality of the data. An application on a real dataset regarding daily electrical power demand shows the functioning of the supervised classification proposal. A simulation study with nine scenarios highlights the performance of this approach and compares it with other functional classification methods. The results demonstrate that this line of research is exciting and promising; indeed, in addition to the benefits of the suggested interpretative tools, we exceed the previously established accuracy records on a dataset available online.

This paper offers a supervised classification strategy that combines functional data analysis with unsupervised and supervised classification methods. Specifically, a two-steps classification technique for high-dimensional time series treated as functional data is suggested. The first stage is based on extracting additional knowledge from the data using unsupervised classification employing suitable metrics. The second phase applies functional supervised classification of the new patterns learned via appropriate basis representations. The experiments on ECG data and comparison with the classical approaches show the effectiveness of the proposed technique and exciting refinement in terms of accuracy. A simulation study with six scenarios is also offered to demonstrate the efficacy of the suggested strategy. The results reveal that this line of investigation is compelling and worthy of further development.

This paper introduces a novel supervised classification method based on dynamic clustering (DC) and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) learning algorithms, denoted DC-KNN. The aim is to improve the accuracy of a classifier by using a DC method to discover the hidden patterns of the apriori groups of the training set. It provides a partitioning of each group into a predetermined number of subgroups. A new objective function is designed for the DC variant, based on a trade-off between the compactness and separation of all subgroups in the original groups. Moreover, the proposed DC method uses adaptive distances which assign a set of weights to the variables of each cluster, which depend on both their intra-cluster and inter-cluster structure. DC-KNN performs the minimization of a suitable objective function. Next, the KNN algorithm takes into account objects by assigning them to the label of subgroups. Furthermore, the classification step is performed according to two KNN competing algorithms. The proposed strategies have been evaluated using both synthetic data and widely used real datasets from public repositories. The achieved results have confirmed the effectiveness and robustness of the strategy in improving classification accuracy in comparison to alternative approaches.