Data Mining

7

k-Nearest Neighbor Classifier and Supervised Clustering

This chapter introduces two classification methods: k-nearest neighbor classifier and supervised clustering, which includes the k-nearest neighbor classifier as a part of the method. Some applications of supervised clustering are given with references.

7.1    k-Nearest Neighbor Classifier

For a data point x_i with p attribute variables:

${\mathit{x}}_i=\left[\begin{array}{c}{x}_{i,1}\\ ⋮\\ x_{i,p}\end{array}\right]$

and one target variable y whose categorical value needs to be determined, a k-nearest neighbor classifier first locates k data points that are most similar to (i.e., closest to) the data point as the k-nearest neighbors of the data point and then uses the target classes of these k-nearest neighbors to determine the target class of ...