Birds of the Same Feather Flock Together: Explaining K Nearest Neighbors for Absolute Beginners
Just as birds of the same feather flock together, data points in a dataset with similar characteristics tend to cluster together. This is the fundamental idea behind the K Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm, a popular and intuitive method used in machine learning. This blog post aims to explain KNN in a way that is accessible and understandable for everyone. What is K Nearest Neighbors? K Nearest Neighbors, or KNN, is a supervised machine learning algorithm that classifies a data point based on how its neighbors are classified. To illustrate, imagine you're trying to understand a person's character. One way you might do this is by looking at their friends or the group they hang out with. If most of their friends are athletes, you might classify this person as an athlete too. This is similar to how KNN works. However, KNN is considered a lazy learning algorithm, meaning it doesn't immediately generalize from the training data. It waits until it is given a test observati