KNN (K-Nearest Neighbors) is Dead!

I'm talking about the demise of the popular KNN algorithm that is taught in pretty much every Data Science course! Read on to find out what's replacing this staple in every Data Scientists' toolkit. Finding "K" similar items to any given item is widely known in the machine learning community as a "similarity" search or "nearest neighbor" (NN) search. The most widely known NN search algorithm is the K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) algorithm. In KNN, given a collection of objects like an e-commerce catalog of handphones, we can find a small number (K) nearest neighbors from this entire catalog for any new search query.