Improving classification accuracy by identifying and removing instances that should be misclassified

Appropriately handling noise and outliers is an important issue in data mining. In this paper we examine how noise and outliers are handled by learning algorithms. We introduce a filtering method called PRISM that identifies and removes instances that should be misclassified. We refer to the set of removed instances as ISMs (instances that should be misclassified). We examine PRISM and compare it against 3 existing outlier detection methods and 1 noise reduction technique on 48 data sets using 9 learning algorithms. Using PRISM, the classification accuracy increases from 78.5% to 79.8% on a set of 53 data sets and is statistically significant. In addition, the accuracy on the non-outlier instances increases from 82.8% to 84.7%. PRISM achieves a higher classification accuracy than the outlier detection methods and compares favorably with the noise reduction method.