Efficient Data Valuation for Weighted Nearest Neighbor Algorithms

This work aims to address an open problem in data valuation literature concerning the efficient computation of Data Shapley for weighted $K$ nearest neighbor algorithm (WKNN-Shapley). By considering the accuracy of hard-label KNN with discretized weights as the utility function, we reframe the computation of WKNN-Shapley into a counting problem and introduce a quadratic-time algorithm, presenting a notable improvement from $O(N^K)$, the best result from existing literature. We develop a deterministic approximation algorithm that further improves computational efficiency while maintaining the key fairness properties of the Shapley value. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate WKNN-Shapley's computational efficiency and its superior performance in discerning data quality compared to its unweighted counterpart.