Skip main navigation

Nearest neighbor

Nearest-neighbor is a classic classification method that often gets good results. Ian Witten shows how to use it with different numbers of neighbors.

“Nearest neighbor” (equivalently, “instance based”) is a classic method that often yields good results. Just stash away the training instances. Be lazy! – do nothing until you have to make a prediction. Then, to classify a test instance, search the training set for the closest training instance and use its class. A similarity function is needed to measure “closeness”; you might want to normalize the attributes first; and you might want to use several neighbors and let them vote on the result.

This article is from the free online

Data Mining with Weka

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now