K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) in pattern recognition is a non-parametric method used for classification and regression. In both cases, the input consists of the k closest training examples in the feature space. The output depends on whether k-NN is used for classification or regression.
In k-NN classification, the output is a class membership. An object is classified by a majority vote of its neighbors, with the object being assigned to the class most common among its k nearest neighbors (K is a positive integer, typically small). If K = 1, then the object is simply assigned to the class of that single nearest neighbor. In K-NN regression, the output is the property value for the object. This value is the average of the values of its k nearest neighbors. K-NN is a type of instance-based learning, or lazy learning, where the function is only approximated locally and all computation is deferred until classification. Both for classification and regression, it can be useful to assign weight to the contributions of the neighbors, so that the nearer neighbors contribute more to the average than the more distant ones. A shortcoming of the k-NN algorithm is that it is sensitive to the local structure of the data.
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