Abstract: Systems and methods are provided for classifying an input feature vector, representing a vehicle occupant, into one of a plurality of occupant classes. A database (106) contains a plurality of feature vectors in a multidimensional feature space. Each feature vector has an associated class from the plurality of output classes. A data pruner (108) eliminates redundant feature vectors from the database. A data modeler (109) constructs an instance-based, non-parametric classification model (110) in the multidimensional feature space from the plurality of feature vectors. A class discriminator (112) selects an occupant class from the plurality of occupant classes according to the constructed classification model.