Key Concepts

Review core concepts you need to learn to master this subject

K-Nearest Neighbors

Regression in KNN Algorithm

KNN Classification Algorithm in Scikit Learn

Euclidean Distance

K-Nearest Neighbors

The K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm is a supervised machine learning algorithm for labeling an unknown data point given existing labeled data.

The nearness of points is typically determined by using distance algorithms such as the Euclidean distance formula based on parameters of the data. The algorithm will classify a point based on the labels of the K nearest neighbor points, where the value of K can be specified.

Regression in KNN Algorithm

K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm uses ‘feature similarity’ to predict values of any new data points. This means that the new point is assigned a value based on how closely it resembles the points in the training set. During regression implementation, the average of the values is taken to be the final prediction, whereas during the classification implementation mode of the values is taken to be the final prediction.

KNN Classification Algorithm in Scikit Learn

Scikit-learn is a very popular Machine Learning library in Python which provides a KNeighborsClassifier object which performs the KNN classification. The n_neighbors parameter passed to the KNeighborsClassifier object sets the desired k value that checks the k closest neighbors for each unclassified point.

The object provides a .fit() method which takes in training data and a .predict() method which returns the classification of a set of data points.

Euclidean Distance

The Euclidean Distance between two points can be computed, knowing the coordinates of those points.

On a 2-D plane, the distance between two points p and q is the square-root of the sum of the squares of the difference between their x and y components. Remember the Pythagorean Theorem: a^2 + b^2 = c^2 ?

We can write a function to compute this distance. Let’s assume that points are represented by tuples of the form (x_coord, y_coord). Also remember that computing the square-root of some value n can be done in a couple of ways: math.sqrt(n), using the math library, or n ** 0.5 (n raised to the power of 1/2).

def distance(p1, p2):
  x_diff_squared = (p1[0] - p2[0]) ** 2
  y_diff_squared = (p1[1] - p2[1]) ** 2
  return (x_diff_squared + y_diff_squared) ** 0.5

distance( (0, 0), (3, 4) )      # => 5.0
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Distance Formula
Lesson 1 of 2
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  1. 1

    In this lesson, you will learn three different ways to define the distance between two points: 1. Euclidean Distance 2. Manhattan Distance 3. Hamming Distance Before diving into the distance form…

  2. 2

    Euclidean Distance is the most commonly used distance formula. To find the Euclidean distance between two points, we first calculate the squared distance between each dimension. If we add up al…

  3. 3

    Manhattan Distance is extremely similar to Euclidean distance. Rather than summing the squared difference between each dimension, we instead sum the absolute value of the difference between eac…

  4. 4

    Hamming Distance is another slightly different variation on the distance formula. Instead of finding the difference of each dimension, Hamming distance only cares about whether the dimensions a…

  5. 5

    Now that you’ve written these three distance formulas yourself, let’s look at how to use them using Python’s SciPy library: - Euclidean Distance […] - Manhattan Distance […] - Hamming Di…

  1. 1

    K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) is a classification algorithm. The central idea is that data points with similar attributes tend to fall into similar categories. Consider the image to the right. Th…

  2. 2

    Before diving into the K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm, let’s first take a minute to think about an example. Consider a dataset of movies. Let’s brainstorm some features of a movie data point. A fe…

  3. 3

    In the first exercise, we were able to visualize the dataset and estimate the […] nearest neighbors of an unknown point. But a computer isn’t going to be able to do that! We need to define wha…

  4. 4

    Making a movie rating predictor based on just the length and release date of movies is pretty limited. There are so many more interesting pieces of data about movies that we could use! So let’s add…

  5. 5

    In the next three lessons, we’ll implement the three steps of the K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm: 1. Normalize the data 2. Find the […] nearest neighbors 3. Classify the new point based on t…

  6. 6

    The K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm: 1. Normalize the data 2. Find the […] nearest neighbors 3. Classify the new point based on those neighbors — Now that our data has been normalized and…

  7. 7

    The K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm: 1. Normalize the data 2. Find the […] nearest neighbors 3. Classify the new point based on those neighbors — We’ve now found the […] nearest neigh…

  8. 8

    Nice work! Your classifier is now able to predict whether a movie will be good or bad. So far, we’ve only tested this on a completely random point […] . In this exercise we’re going to pick a re…

  9. 9

    You’ve now built your first K Nearest Neighbors algorithm capable of classification. You can feed your program a never-before-seen movie and it can predict whether its IMDb rating was above or belo…

  10. 10

    In the previous exercise, we found that our classifier got one point in the training set correct. Now we can test every point to calculate the validation accuracy. The validation accuracy change…

  11. 11

    The graph to the right shows the validation accuracy of our movie classifier as […] increases. When […] is small, overfitting occurs and the accuracy is relatively low. On the other hand, w…

  12. 12

    You’ve now written your own K-Nearest Neighbor classifier from scratch! However, rather than writing your own classifier every time, you can use Python’s […] library. […] is a Python librar…

  13. 13

    Congratulations! You just implemented your very own classifier from scratch and used Python’s […] library. In this lesson, you learned some techniques very specific to the K-Nearest Neighbor al…

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