k-Nearest Neighbors: Fit

Having explored the Congressional voting records dataset, it is time now to build your first classifier. In this exercise, you will fit a k-Nearest Neighbors classifier to the voting dataset, which has once again been pre-loaded for you into a DataFrame df.

In the video, Hugo discussed the importance of ensuring your data adheres to the format required by the scikit-learn API. The features need to be in an array where each column is a feature and each row a different observation or data point - in this case, a Congressman's voting record. The target needs to be a single column with the same number of observations as the feature data. We have done this for you in this exercise. Notice we named the feature array X and response variable y: This is in accordance with the common scikit-learn practice.

Your job is to create an instance of a k-NN classifier with 6 neighbors (by specifying the n_neighbors parameter) and then fit it to the data. The data has been pre-loaded into a DataFrame called df.

Import KNeighborsClassifier from sklearn.neighbors.
Create arrays X and y for the features and the target variable. Here this has been done for you. Note the use of .drop() to drop the target variable 'party' from the feature array X as well as the use of the .values attribute to ensure X and y are NumPy arrays. Without using .values, X and y are a DataFrame and Series respectively; the scikit-learn API will accept them in this form also as long as they are of the right shape.
Instantiate a KNeighborsClassifier called knn with 6 neighbors by specifying the n_neighbors parameter.
Fit the classifier to the data using the .fit() method.

Exercise

k-Nearest Neighbors: Fit

Instructions