k-Nearest Neighbour Classifiers

Abstract. Perhaps the most straightforward classifier in the arsenal or machine learning techniques is the Nearest Neighbour Classifier – classification is achieved by identifying the nearest neighbours to a query example and using those neighbours to determine the class of the query. This approach to classification is of particular importance today because issues of poor run-time performance is not such a problem these days with the computational power that is available. This paper presents an overview of techniques for Nearest Neighbour classification focusing on; mechanisms for assessing similarity (distance), computational issues in identifying nearest neighbours and mechanisms for reducing the dimension of the data. 1