Nearest neighbor may refer to: *

Nearest neighbor search Nearest neighbor search (NNS), as a form of proximity search, is the optimization problem of finding the point in a given set that is closest (or most similar) to a given point. Closeness is typically expressed in terms of a dissimilarity function ...

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphic ...

and in computational geometry *

Nearest-neighbor interpolation Nearest-neighbor interpolation (also known as proximal interpolation or, in some contexts, point sampling) is a simple method of multivariate interpolation in one or more dimensions. Interpolation is the problem of approximating the value of a ...

for interpolating data *

Nearest neighbor graph The nearest neighbor graph (NNG) is a directed graph defined for a set of points in a metric space, such as the Euclidean distance in the plane. The NNG has a vertex for each point, and a directed edge from ''p'' to ''q'' whenever ''q'' is a near ...

in geometry * Nearest neighbor function in probability theory * Nearest neighbor decoding in coding theory * The

k-nearest neighbor algorithm In statistics, the ''k''-nearest neighbors algorithm (''k''-NN) is a non-parametric supervised learning method first developed by Evelyn Fix and Joseph Hodges in 1951, and later expanded by Thomas Cover. It is used for classification and regre ...

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, an application of generalized forms of nearest neighbor search and interpolation * The

nearest neighbour algorithm The nearest neighbour algorithm was one of the first algorithms used to solve the travelling salesman problem approximately. In that problem, the salesman starts at a random city and repeatedly visits the nearest city until all have been visited. ...

for approximately solving the

travelling salesman problem The travelling salesman problem (also called the travelling salesperson problem or TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each cit ...

* The nearest neighbor method for determining the

thermodynamics Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, work, and temperature, and their relation to energy, entropy, and the physical properties of matter and radiation. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws o ...

nucleic acid Nucleic acids are biopolymers, macromolecules, essential to all known forms of life. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomers made of three components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. The two main ...

s * The nearest neighbor method for calculating distances between clusters in

hierarchical clustering In data mining and statistics, hierarchical clustering (also called hierarchical cluster analysis or HCA) is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. Strategies for hierarchical clustering generally fall into tw ...

See also