machine learning in action

k-Nearest Neighbors
Pros: High accuracy, insensitive to outliers, no assumptions about data
Cons: Computationally expensive, requires a lot of memory

Works with: Numeric values, nominal values

Pseudocode for this function would look like this:

For every point in our dataset:
calculate the distance between inX and the current point
sort the distances in increasing order
take k items with lowest distances to inX
find the majority class among these items
return the majority class as our prediction for the class of inX

When dealing with values that lie in different ranges, it’s common to normalize them.