Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

9.5 Lazy Learners (or Learning from Your Neighbors)

The classification methods discussed so far in this book—decision tree induction, Bayesian classification, rule-based classification, classification by backpropagation, support vector machines, and classification based on association rule mining—are all examples of eager learners. Eager learners, when given a set of training tuples, will construct a generalization (i.e., classification) model before receiving new (e.g., test) tuples to classify. We can think of the learned model as being ready and eager to classify previously unseen tuples.

Imagine a contrasting lazy approach, in which the learner instead waits until the last minute before doing any model construction to classify a given test ...