Preprocessing kNN algorithm classification using K-means and distance matrix with students’ academic performance dataset

The existence of outliers in the dataset can cause low accuracy in a classification process. Outliers in the dataset can be removed from a preprocessing stage of classification algorithms. Clustering can be used as an outlier detection method. This study applies K-means and a distance matrix to detect outliers and remove them from datasets with class labels. This research used a dataset of students’ academic performance totaling 6847 instances, having 18 attributes and 3 class labels. Preprocessing applies the K-means method to get centroid in each class. The distance matrix is used to evaluate the distance of instance to the centroid. Outliers, which are a different class, will be removed from the dataset. This preprocessing improves the classification accuracy of the kNN algorithm. Data without preprocessing has 72.28 % accuracy, preprocessed data using K-means with Euclidean has 98.42 % accuracy (an increase of 26.14 %), while the K-means with Manhattan has 97.76 % accuracy (an increase of 25.48 %).