Supervised Machine Learning with Python

Implementing KNNs from scratch

In this section, we will jump into the packtml code base, and see how we can implement it from scratch. We'll start by revisiting the classic algorithm we covered in the last section, and then we'll look at the actual Python code, which has some implementation changes.

Recall the archetypal KNN algorithm. The efficient implementation is going to be to pre-compute the distances and store them in a special heap. Of course, with most things in computer science, there's the clever way and then there's the easy-to-read way. We're going to do things a bit differently in an effort to maximize the readability, but it's the same fundamental algorithm.