Parallel Implementation of kNN Algorithm for Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract

Current advances in parallel processing technology aims at providing unmatched degree of computational power in upcoming days. Parallel computation is an efficient form of information processing which exploits the concurrency of execution. This paper investigates the use of parallel programming, when applied on k Nearest Neighbors (kNN) algorithm which is intended for classification and prediction of the large dataset. Breast cancer dataset is used for classification and prediction which consists of two labels namely, malignant and benign. kNN is a non-parametric algorithm which makes use of similarity measure to classify the dataset into different categories. The similarity between the data points is computed by using Euclidean distance formula. Multiple threads are created for parallel processing and an appropriate kNN graph is constructed, which helps in easier implementation. Finally, execution speeds for sequential and parallel programs is recorded. The results are verified by using frameworks namely, Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) highlighting that parallel execution takes less time when compared to sequential execution.