Data Analysis with R - Second Edition

Using k-NN in R

The dataset we will be using for all the examples in this chapter is the PimaIndiansDiabetes dataset from the mlbench package. This dataset is part of the data collected from one of the numerous diabetes studies done on the Pima Indians, a group of indigenous Americans who have among the highest prevalence of Type II diabetes in the world—probably due to a combination of genetic factors and their relatively recent introduction to a heavily processed Western diet. For 768 observations, it has nine attributes, including skin fold thickness, BMI, and so on, and a binary variable representing whether the patient had diabetes. We will be using the eight predictor variables to train a classifier to predict whether a patient has ...