Method and Apparatus for Incremental Computation of the Accuracy of a Categorization-by-Example System

A computer-implemented method of incrementally updating precision and recall curves in a k nearest neighbor database, said database including original documents, categories, category assignments for the original documents, and category scores for the original documents, the method including:

• retaining for the original documents a list of their m nearest neighbors and corresponding similarity scores, wherein m>k;
• adding or deleting one or more original documents and their category assignments;
• identifying the documents influenced by the adding or deleting;
• updating one or more category scores of the influenced documents;
• and
• computing precision and recall curves for the categories having updated category scores.