In this blog I want to demonstrate how to implement a simple K Nearest Neighbour classifier from scratch using test-driven development (TDD). Although this is not something you would typically do day-to-day, it is a good way to fully understand how the classifier internals work albeit in a much more watered-down form. This blog takes a cue from the excellent Google Developers “Machine Learning Recipes” series, but goes approaches the classifier implementation using TDD as well as generalising the prediction algorithm.

## Scikit-Learn Implementation

Our starting place will be the Scikit-Learn (abbreviated to sklearn) implementation of the KNN classifier,

Going from top to bottom, we,

1. Load the iris data set from sklearn, this is a set of 150 entries with four features, each row corresponding to one of three labels
2. Assign the input and target features to variables X and y
3. Perform a test-train split on the data set
4. Initialise the KNN classifier
5. Pass in the training data. The training data forms the reference for our test data
6. Test the classifier with the test data
7. Print out the accuracy of the classifier

This is the basic workflow we want to retain, only we will call our own classifier rather than KNeighborsClassifier, while keeping the same API contract. The above code sample will also act as a performance benchmark, which we will return to later on.

Neighbours Benchmark Accuracy
1 90.7%
3 93.3%
5 96%
7 96%

## Some Theory

Before we get to coding anything else, let’s think about how the KNN algorithm works. Put simply, we want to predict the label for a given row in our dataset. For a given row in the test data, we compare it against each row in the training data. To do this we make the assumption that the label for our given row must be the same as the label of the nearest neigbouring row in the training dataset. This can be just the single nearest neigbour or the most frequently occuring label of several nearest neigbour as specified by the n_neighbours parameter. Nearest in this case is given by some measure of the difference between individual features in each row under consideration - the smaller this difference the closer the points are, the more likely they are to have the same label. Our distance measure will be the Euclidean distance, which is just a general form of Pythagoras’ theorem:

For this TDD approach we will be using pytest. To follow along create two files in the same directory, main.py and test.py. Running pytest test.py from the command line should run the test suite.

## Nearest-Neighbour Implementation

In our first attempt, we will be creating a KNN classifier that only considers a single nearest neighbour, the correct label is simply the label of the single row in the training data with smallest distance to the current row in the test data under consideration. To code this implementation, we will be using the outside-in approach to TDD: we define the API interface, and code the internals from there.

Following the example of the sklearn code sample above, we want to be able to initialise the classifier with a parameter n_neighbours, which should default to one if not provided. Writing out our first test,

Running this should obviously fail. In a new file main.py we want to create our new class with a constructor that satisfies the requirements of the test,

Then update the test file to import this file,

And we should have a green test.

We’ve now completed our first successful cycle of TDD, the rest is wash and repeat. Our next test should allow us to bootstrap our classifier by calling the fit() method. This allows us to pass in training data and training labels, X_train and y_train respectively. To test this, we need to specify some mock data corresponding to these values in addition to calling the classifier. The mock data could be anything though so long as it is truthy. For our purposes though, I’ve tried to mimick the structure of the iris data set of four features per input. The updated test file is below with the previous test case omitted for clarity.

The fix for this is very simple, just create a fit() method for our class,

We get to green once again. Now we come to actually predicting the label. Starting more simply this time, let’s write out a single test case following the API above,

In addition to the mock data previously defined, we have the test data X_test and y_test, which are the test inputs and the correct label respectively. The simple fix is to define predict() and return a hardcoded value

This will make the current test green, but won’t help if the test data changes, which is precisely what we’ll do

I’ll come to explain the precise arrangement later on, but now we have multiple contending rows. The algorithm for prediction is as follows, for a given X_test value,

• Initialise variables to keep track of the smallest distance and corresponding index for the row in the training data
• Then iterate through the training data
• For a given row in training data find the distance between that row and X_test
• If the newly calculated distance is smaller than current smallest distance then update both the smallest distance and the corresponding index
• Having gone through all the training data, return the label corresponding to the closest index

The final piece of the puzzle is how we will calculate the distance between two rows, which as we said above with be given by the Euclidean distance. Rather than do this from scratch we will import the distance module from the SciPy library. Putting this altogether we should get the following.

The final step to make is to consider the case where we have multiple rows in X_test - we need to call the above method for each row. I’m going to skip through the steps to do this, but the key word is ‘refactor’: I’ve moved the previous implementation into its own method __closest. predict now iteratively calls this new method and returns an array of predictions corresponding to each row in X_test. To TDD this, simply extend X_test and y_test.

This is the complete implementation of our KNN classifier where n_neigbors is implicity set to one. The reported accuracy is 90.7% - matching the benchmark perfectly.

## KNN Implementation

Now we want to generalise the classifier where n_neighbors is some odd number greater than or equal to one (odd to prevent ties). Having tests in place makes this process much easier as we can always backtrack if we break some functionality. Before going any further, we should add some test cases - we want to follow the philosophy of testing requirements not specific examples, or in other words a single test should run with a number of different parameters. Pytest terms this ‘parametrizing’ test functions:

The parameters used are completely arbitrary, but will form the basis of a comparison with the benchmark later on. Running this now, we should see three separate tests execute. The same change should also be made to the fit() test. Updating the predict() test is a little different, because we want to update this function’s internals as well. So far we have only considered taking the label of the single nearest row in the training data as the correct label - but what if we were to take the most frequently occuring label from a set of training data rows? We should see an increase in the reported accuracy.

The algorithm will be as follows,

1. For a given row in the test data, find all the distances from the rows in the training data following our distance measure
2. For this distances, find the k smallest values, where k is given by n_neighbors
3. For these k values, return the most common, this is the predicted label

Before we get to the implementation, we need to set up the tests. We need to parameterise both n_neighbors and y_test - the predicted label. Why’s that? Well first, think about what the new algoritm does: it returns the most commonly occuring value from a set of values. What might not be clear is what that means for us given that I want to keep X_train and y_train unchanged, which are repeated below.

If we take the k smallest distances between X_test and each of the rows in X_train, then we might find ourselves with a tie - something I don’t want to consider for the sake of simplicity. Considering odd values for n_neighbors only for X_test = [[0, 0, 0, 0]], then if n_neighbors = 1, our predicted label should be 0 as this is the label of the single row with the smallest distance from X_test. For n_neighbors = 3, we should instead get a predicted label of 1. That is because although row [0, 0, 0, 0] has the single smallest distance, of the three rows with the smallest distance [[0, 0, 0, 0], [1, 1, 1, 1], [1, 1, 1, 1]], two of the three have the label 1. Moving to n_neighbors = 5 is where things get difficult, because for our X_train the five rows with smallest distances will have labels [0, 1, 1, 2, 2] leading to a tie. This is precisely what I don’t want! So if I’m committed to keeping X_train and y_train constant the best thing to do is skip n_neighbors = 5 and instead consider n_neighbors = 7. That is simply because for the given X_train and y_Train above, I can get a single most common value from the labels [0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2].

Putting the above discussion altogether, for our X_train and y_train, the predicted label, y_test will vary for different values of n_neighbors. So our updated predict() test will look like,

Now we can break the tests! We don’t need to do anything directly to predict() as it is just the interface. To make this easier, I want to split __closest into two methods, __closest, which will now find and return a list of the distances betweet X_test and the rows in X_train, and __vote, which will gind the most common values out of the smallest n_neighbors distances.

There are few things going on the code sample worth highlighting,

• As we want to return the label, not the distance, I chose to create a tuple for each distance and the corresponding label in y_train. These are then appended to the list
• To make __vote simpler, we are passing a sorted list of tuples, sorting by the distance. There are many ways to do this, but I used a lambda function
• __vote should be fairly self-explanatory. To make things simpler, I’m using a Counter object to find the most common label from the list of labels

Using a list comprehension we can make this much cleaner,

The full code can be found here.

## Evaluation

Putting this altogether, and rerunning the first code sample only substituting the sklearn KNN classifier for our own we obtain,

Neighbours Our Accuracy Benchmark Accuracy
1 90.7% 90.7%
3 93.3% 93.3%
5 96% 96%
7 96% 96%

Which is great news: we are able to obtain the same accuracy with our simple implementation. However our implemenation is several orders of magnitude slower than sklearn’s. Interesting to note, but perhaps not suprising, our original implementation with n_neighbors hardcoded to one has a faster running time of around 80 ms.

Neighbours Our Running Time (ms) Benchmark Running Time (ms)
1 95.4 0.451
3 94.3 0.539
5 88.6 0.458
7 102 0.465

All the best,

Tom