DSPA Chapter 6: k-Nearest Neighbors Classification

In the next several chapters we will concentrate of various progressively advanced machine learning, classificaiton and clustering techniques. There are two categories of data classification techniques - unsupervised and supervised (human-guided) classification. In general, supervised classification aims to identify or predict predefined classes and label new objects as members of specific classes. Whereas, unsupervised clustering attempts to group objects into sets, without knowing a priori labels, and determine relationships between objects.

In the context of machine learning, classification is supervised learning and clustering is unsupervised learning.