A global optimization approach to classification

We reduce the classification problem to solving a global optimization problem and a method based on a combination of the cutting angle method and a local search is applied to the solution of this problem. The proposed method allows to solve classification problems for databases with an arbitrary number of classes. Numerical experiments have been carried out with databases of small to medium size. We present their results and provide comparisons of these results with those obtained by 29 different classification algorithms. The best performance overall was achieved with the global optimization method.