Putting it all together

Now, we are going to perform the same procedure as before, except that we will reset, regroup, and try a new algorithm: K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN).

How to do it...

1. Start by importing the model from sklearn, followed by a balanced split:

from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, stratify=y, random_state = 0)

The random_state parameter fixes the random_seed in the function train_test_split. In the preceding example, the random_state is set to zero and can be set to any integer.

2. Construct two different KNN models by varying the n_neighbors parameter. Observe that the number of folds is now 10. Tenfold cross-validation is common in the machine learning community, particularly in data science competitions:

from sklearn.model_selection import cross_val_score
knn_3_clf = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors = 3)
knn_5_clf = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors = 5)

knn_3_scores = cross_val_score(knn_3_clf, X_train, y_train, cv=10)
knn_5_scores = cross_val_score(knn_5_clf, X_train, y_train, cv=10)

3. Score and print out the scores for selection:

print "knn_3 mean scores: ", knn_3_scores.mean(), "knn_3 std: ",knn_3_scores.std()
print "knn_5 mean scores: ", knn_5_scores.mean(), " knn_5 std: ",knn_5_scores.std()

knn_3 mean scores:  0.798333333333 knn_3 std:  0.0908142181722
knn_5 mean scores:  0.806666666667 knn_5 std:  0.0559320575496

Both nearest neighbor types score similarly, yet the KNN with parameter n_neighbors = 5 is a bit more stable. This is an example of hyperparameter optimization which we will examine closely throughout the book.

There's more...

You could have just as easily run a simple loop to score the function more quickly:

all_scores = []
for n_neighbors in range(3,9,1):
    knn_clf = KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors = n_neighbors)
    all_scores.append((n_neighbors, cross_val_score(knn_clf, X_train, y_train, cv=10).mean()))
sorted(all_scores, key = lambda x:x[1], reverse = True)  

Its output suggests that n_neighbors = 4 is a good choice:

[(4, 0.85111111111111115),
 (7, 0.82611111111111113),
 (6, 0.82333333333333347),
 (5, 0.80666666666666664),
 (3, 0.79833333333333334),
 (8, 0.79833333333333334)]