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Module 3: Classification and Prediction

20222m

The decision boundaries produced in nearest-neighbor classifiers are

(i) rectilinear
(ii) oblique
(iii) arbitrary
(iv) None of the above

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Answer: (iii) arbitrary

In nearest-neighbour (k-NN) classification, a new object is assigned to the class most common among its kk closest labelled training objects. The decision boundaries it produces are exactly the perimeters of Voronoi diagrams: each training object owns a "cell" of the feature space containing all points closer to it than to any other object, and cell boundaries (perpendicular bisectors) form the class boundaries.

  • These boundaries are not restricted to axis-parallel rectilinear lines (option i),
  • nor to fixed oblique/hyperplanar shapes such as SVM or logistic-regression bounds (option ii).

For that reason the textbook (Han & Kamber) states that the decision boundaries of nearest-neighbour classifiers are arbitrary — they can take any irregular, data-driven shape determined purely by where the local training points lie.

Hence the correct answer is (iii) arbitrary.

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