Summary
In this chapter, we learned about classification using k-NN. Unlike many classification algorithms, k-nearest neighbors does not do any learning. It simply stores the training data verbatim. Unlabeled test examples are then matched to the most similar records in the training set using a distance function, and the unlabeled example is assigned the label of its neighbors.
In spite of the fact that k-NN is a very simple algorithm, it is capable of tackling extremely complex tasks such as the identification of cancerous masses. In a few simple lines of R code, we were able to correctly identify whether a mass was malignant or benign 98 percent of the time.
In the next chapter, we will examine a classification method that uses probability to ...
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