In this article, we will cover how K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm works and how to run k-nearest neighbor in R. It is one of the most widely used algorithm for classification problems.
K-Nearest Neighbor Simplified |
Introduction to K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN)
Knn is a non-parametric supervised learning technique in which we try to classify the data point to a given category with the help of training set. In simple words, it captures information of all training cases and classifies new cases based on a similarity.Predictions are made for a new instance (x) by searching through the entire training set for the K most similar cases (neighbors) and summarizing the output variable for those K cases. In classification this is the mode (or most common) class value.
How to calculate K Nearest Neighbor (KNN)?
Suppose we have height, weight and T-shirt size of some customers and we need to predict the T-shirt size of a new customer given only height and weight information we have. Data including height, weight and T-shirt size information is shown below -Height (in cms) | Weight (in kgs) | T Shirt Size |
---|---|---|
158 | 58 | M |
158 | 59 | M |
158 | 63 | M |
160 | 59 | M |
160 | 60 | M |
163 | 60 | M |
163 | 61 | M |
160 | 64 | L |
163 | 64 | L |
165 | 61 | L |
165 | 62 | L |
165 | 65 | L |
168 | 62 | L |
168 | 63 | L |
168 | 66 | L |
170 | 63 | L |
170 | 64 | L |
170 | 68 | L |
There are many distance functions but Euclidean is the most commonly used measure. It is mainly used when data is continuous. Manhattan distance is also very common for continuous variables.
Distance Functions |
=SQRT((161-158)^2+(61-58)^2)
Similarly, we will calculate distance of all the training cases with new case and calculates the rank in terms of distance. The smallest distance value will be ranked 1 and considered as nearest neighbor.
Step 2 : Find K-Nearest NeighborsLet k be 5. Then the algorithm searches for the 5 customers closest to Monica, i.e. most similar to Monica in terms of attributes, and see what categories those 5 customers were in. If 4 of them had ‘Medium T shirt sizes’ and 1 had 'Large T shirt size' then your best guess for Monica is ‘Medium T shirt. See the calculation shown in the snapshot below -
Calculate KNN manually |
KNN: Visual Representation |
Assumptions of KNN
1. StandardizationWhen independent variables in training data are measured in different units, it is important to standardize variables before calculating distance. For example, if one variable is based on height in cms, and the other is based on weight in kgs then height will influence more on the distance calculation. In order to make them comparable we need to standardize them which can be done by any of the following methods :
Standardization |
After standardization, 5th closest value got changed as height was dominating earlier before standardization. Hence, it is important to standardize predictors before running K-nearest neighbor algorithm.
KNN after standardization |
2. Outlier
Low k-value is sensitive to outliers and a higher K-value is more resilient to outliers as it considers more voters to decide prediction.
- K-mean is an unsupervised learning technique (no dependent variable) whereas KNN is a supervised learning algorithm (dependent variable exists)
- K-mean is a clustering technique which tries to split data points into K-clusters such that the points in each cluster tend to be near each other whereas K-nearest neighbor tries to determine the classification of a point, combines the classification of the K nearest points
Yes, K-nearest neighbor can be used for regression. In other words, K-nearest neighbor algorithm can be applied when dependent variable is continuous. In this case, the predicted value is the average of the values of its k nearest neighbors.
Pros and Cons of KNN
Pros- Easy to understand
- No assumptions about data
- Can be applied to both classification and regression
- Works easily on multi-class problems
- Memory Intensive / Computationally expensive
- Sensitive to scale of data
- Not work well on rare event (skewed) target variable
- Struggle when high number of independent variables
For any given problem, a small value of k will lead to a large variance in predictions. Alternatively, setting k to a large value may lead to a large model bias.
K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) in R
We are going to use historical data of past win/loss statistics and the corresponding speeches. This dataset comprises of 1524 observations on 14 variables. Dependent variable is win/loss where 1 indicates win and 0 indicates loss. The independent variables are:-
Proportion of words in the speech showing
- Optimism
- Pessimism
- The use of Past
- The use of Present
- The use of Future
- Number of times he/she mentions his/her own party
- Number of times he/she mentions his/her opposite parties
-
Some measure indicating the content of speech showing
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
- Emotionality
# Read data data1 = read.csv("US Presidential Data.csv") View(data1)We read the CSV file with the help of read.csv command. Here the first argument is the name of the dataset. The second argument - Header = TRUE or T implies that the first row in our csv file denotes the headings while header = FALSE or F indicates that the data should be read from the first line and does not involves any headings.
# load library library(caret) library(e1071) # Transforming the dependent variable to a factor data1$Win.Loss = as.factor(data1$Win.Loss)Here we will use caret package in order to run knn. Since my dependent variable is numeric here thus we need to transform it to factor using as.factor().
#Partitioning the data into training and validation data set.seed(101) index = createDataPartition(data1$Win.Loss, p = 0.7, list = F ) train = data1[index,] validation = data1[-index,]In order to partition the data into training and validation sets we use createDataPartition() function in caret. Firstly we set the seed to be 101 so that the same results can be obtained. In the createDataPartition() the first argument is the dependent variable , p denotes how much data we want in the training set; here we take 70% of the data in training set and rest in cross validation set, list = F denotes that the indices we obtain should be in form of a vector.
# Explore data
dim(train)
dim(validation)
names(train)
head(train)
head(validation)
The dimensions of training and validation sets are checked via dim(). See first 6 rows of training dataset -
Win.Loss Optimism Pessimism PastUsed FutureUsed PresentUsed OwnPartyCount 1 X1 0.10450450 0.05045045 0.4381443 0.4948454 0.06701031 2 3 X1 0.11257190 0.04930156 0.4159664 0.5168067 0.06722689 1 5 X1 0.10582640 0.05172414 0.3342618 0.5821727 0.08356546 3 7 X1 0.09838275 0.06401617 0.3240741 0.6018519 0.07407407 6 9 X1 0.10610734 0.04688464 0.3633540 0.5372671 0.09937888 2 10 X1 0.10066128 0.05951506 0.3554817 0.5382060 0.10631229 1 OppPartyCount NumericContent Extra Emoti Agree Consc Openn 1 2 0.001877543 4.041 4.049 3.469 2.450 2.548 3 1 0.002131163 3.463 4.039 3.284 2.159 2.465 5 4 0.002229220 4.658 4.023 3.283 2.415 2.836 7 4 0.002251985 3.727 4.108 3.357 2.128 2.231 9 5 0.002446440 4.119 4.396 3.661 2.572 2.599 10 2 0.002107436 3.800 4.501 3.624 2.117 2.154By default, levels of dependent variable in this dataset is "0" "1". Later when we will do prediction, these levels will be used as variable names for prediction so we need to make it valid variable names.
# Setting levels for both training and validation data levels(train$Win.Loss) <- make.names(levels(factor(train$Win.Loss))) levels(validation$Win.Loss) <- make.names(levels(factor(validation$Win.Loss)))Here we are using repeated cross validation method using trainControl . Number denotes either the number of folds and ‘repeats’ is for repeated ‘r’ fold cross validation. In this case, 3 separate 10-fold validations are used.
# Setting up train controls repeats = 3 numbers = 10 tunel = 10 set.seed(1234) x = trainControl(method = "repeatedcv", number = numbers, repeats = repeats, classProbs = TRUE, summaryFunction = twoClassSummary)Using train() function we run our knn; Win.Loss is dependent variable, the full stop after tilde denotes all the independent variables are there. In ‘data=’ we pass our training set, ‘method=’ denotes which technique we want to deploy, setting preProcess to center and scale tells us that we are standardizing our independent variables center : subtract mean from values. scale : divide values by standard deviation. trControl demands our ‘x’ which was obtained via train( ) and tunelength is always an integer which is used to tune our algorithm.
model1 <- train(Win.Loss~. , data = train, method = "knn", preProcess = c("center","scale"), trControl = x, metric = "ROC", tuneLength = tunel) # Summary of model model1 plot(model1)
k-Nearest Neighbors 1068 samples 13 predictor 2 classes: 'X0', 'X1' Pre-processing: centered (13), scaled (13) Resampling: Cross-Validated (10 fold, repeated 3 times) Summary of sample sizes: 961, 962, 961, 962, 961, 962, ... Resampling results across tuning parameters: k ROC Sens Spec 5 0.8440407 0.6910182 0.8382051 7 0.8537506 0.6847658 0.8520513 9 0.8575183 0.6712350 0.8525796 11 0.8588422 0.6545296 0.8592152 13 0.8585478 0.6560976 0.8556333 15 0.8570397 0.6432249 0.8648329 17 0.8547545 0.6448509 0.8627894 19 0.8520574 0.6336043 0.8632867 21 0.8484632 0.6215447 0.8627894 23 0.8453320 0.6071622 0.8658664 ROC was used to select the optimal model using the largest value. The final value used for the model was k = 11.
Cross Validation : Fine Tuning |
# Validation valid_pred <- predict(model1,validation, type = "prob") #Storing Model Performance Scores library(ROCR) pred_val <-prediction(valid_pred[,2],validation$Win.Loss) # Calculating Area under Curve (AUC) perf_val <- performance(pred_val,"auc") perf_val # Plot AUC perf_val <- performance(pred_val, "tpr", "fpr") plot(perf_val, col = "green", lwd = 1.5) #Calculating KS statistics ks <- max(attr(perf_val, "y.values")[[1]] - (attr(perf_val, "x.values")[[1]])) ks
The Area under curve (AUC) on validation dataset is 0.8642.
Special thanks to Ekta Aggarwal for her contribution in this article. She is a co-author of this article. She is a Data Science enthusiast, currently in the final year of her post graduation in statistics from Delhi University.
Really you explained it where well u deserve my salute u clear my all doubt with best example us president
ReplyDeleteWell Explained.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much..
Hi, I'm really struggling to understand why the standardisation is necessary? If KNN is just a comparison of distances apart, then surely its expected that the variable with the larger range will have more influence on distance, why not just use the distances as they are since it is what it is. In the example, after standardization the 5th closest value changed but thats expected since the numbers have changed so how do you know its more accurate than before, and what exactly does standardisation really do that allows the variables to be more comparable? Sorry for my beginner questions, your tutorials are actually the best I've found after browsing many blogs, books and courses so thanks for this.
ReplyDeleteIf you do not standardize your data then the variables in large valued units will dominate the computed distance and variables that are measured in small valued units will contribute very little. It's nothing to do with KNN. Standardisation is also required when you perform clustering because distance function is involved.
DeleteHi, How to calculate similarity based on distance if its a categorial data. For eg if Temperature is given as Hot, Mild and cool and Humidity given as High and Normal and wind is given as Strong and Weak and PlayTennis is given as Yes and No.
ReplyDeleteHi, really grateful for this tutorial which is very clear and helpful. I tried your script in R on same dataset and seed number, but turn out the optimal k is 5 and got quite different plot shape.. Is this normal or something must be not right? But I use the exact same script as yours..thanks
ReplyDeletehow can i deploy in flask framework
ReplyDelete