k-Nearest Twitter Neighbors

I'm also a mathematics lecturer at Cal State East Bay, and have been fortunate to be able to work with my mentor Prateek Jain as a Data Science Fellow at SharpestMinds. This project was selected as a way for me to practice writing a machine learning algorithm from scratch (no scikit-learn allowed!) and to therefore deeply learn and understand the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, or kNN. If you're not already familiar with kNN, it's a nice ML algorithm to make your first deep dive with, because it's relatively intuitive. Zip codes are frequently useful proxies for individuals because people who live in the same neighborhood often have similar economic backgrounds and educational attainment, and are therefore also likely to share values and politics (not a guarantee, though!). So if you wanted to predict whether a particular piece of legislation would pass in an area, you might poll some of the area's constituents and assume most of those constituents' neighbors will feel similarly about your bill as do the majority of those you polled.