Graph k-NN decision boundaries in Matplotlib

Question

How do I color the decision boundaries for a k-Nearest Neighbor classifier as seen here: I've got the data for the 3 classes successfully plotted out using scatter (left picture).

Image source: http://cs231n.github.io/classification/

Answer 1

To plot Desicion boundaries you need to make a meshgrid. You can use np.meshgrid to do this. np.meshgrid requires min and max values of X and Y and a meshstep size parameter. It is sometimes prudent to make the minimal values a bit lower then the minimal value of x and y and the max value a bit higher.

 xx, yy = np.meshgrid(np.arange(x_min, x_max, h),
                     np.arange(y_min, y_max, h))

You then feed your classifier your meshgrid like so Z=clf.predict(np.c_[xx.ravel(), yy.ravel()]) You need to reshape the output of this to be the same format as your original meshgrid Z = Z.reshape(xx.shape). Finally when you are making your plot you need to call plt.pcolormesh(xx, yy, Z, cmap=cmap_light) this will make the dicision boundaries visible in your plot.

Below is a complete example to achieve this found at http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/neighbors/plot_classification.html#sphx-glr-auto-examples-neighbors-plot-classification-py.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.colors import ListedColormap
from sklearn import neighbors, datasets

n_neighbors = 15

# import some data to play with
iris = datasets.load_iris()
X = iris.data[:, :2]  # we only take the first two features. We could
                      # avoid this ugly slicing by using a two-dim dataset
y = iris.target

h = .02  # step size in the mesh

# Create color maps
cmap_light = ListedColormap(['#FFAAAA', '#AAFFAA', '#AAAAFF'])
cmap_bold = ListedColormap(['#FF0000', '#00FF00', '#0000FF'])

for weights in ['uniform', 'distance']:
    # we create an instance of Neighbours Classifier and fit the data.
    clf = neighbors.KNeighborsClassifier(n_neighbors, weights=weights)
    clf.fit(X, y)

    # Plot the decision boundary. For that, we will assign a color to each
    # point in the mesh [x_min, x_max]x[y_min, y_max].
    x_min, x_max = X[:, 0].min() - 1, X[:, 0].max() + 1
    y_min, y_max = X[:, 1].min() - 1, X[:, 1].max() + 1
    xx, yy = np.meshgrid(np.arange(x_min, x_max, h),
                         np.arange(y_min, y_max, h))
    Z = clf.predict(np.c_[xx.ravel(), yy.ravel()])

    # Put the result into a color plot
    Z = Z.reshape(xx.shape)
    plt.figure()
    plt.pcolormesh(xx, yy, Z, cmap=cmap_light)

    # Plot also the training points
    plt.scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], c=y, cmap=cmap_bold)
    plt.xlim(xx.min(), xx.max())
    plt.ylim(yy.min(), yy.max())
    plt.title("3-Class classification (k = %i, weights = '%s')"
              % (n_neighbors, weights))

plt.show()

This results in the following two graphs to be outputted