Prototype selection to improve monotonic nearest neighbor

Student surveys occupy a central place in the evaluation of courses at teaching institutions. At the end of each course, students are requested to evaluate various aspects such as activities, methodology, coordination or resources used. In addition, a final qualification is given to summarize the quality of the course. The prediction of this final qualification can be accomplished by using monotonic classification techniques. The outcome offered by these surveys is particularly significant for faculty and teaching staff associated with the course. The monotonic nearest neighbor classifier is one of the most relevant algorithms in monotonic classification. However, it does suffer from two drawbacks, (a) inefficient execution time in classification and (b) sensitivity to no monotonic examples. Prototype selection is a data reduction process for classification based on nearest neighbor that can be used to alleviate these problems. This paper proposes a prototype selection algorithm called Monotonic Iterative Prototype Selection (MONIPS) algorithm. Our objective is two-fold. The first one is to introduce MONIPS as a method for obtaining monotonic solutions. MONIPS has proved to be competitive with classical prototype selection solutions adapted to monotonic domain. Besides, to further demonstrate the good performance of MONIPS in the context of a student survey about taught courses.