How is clustering like the nearest neighbor technique?
The nearest neighbor algorithm is basically a refinement of clustering in the sense that they both use distance in some feature space to create either structure in the data or predictions. The nearest neighbor algorithm is a refinement since part of the algorithm usually is a way of automatically determining the weighting of the importance of the predictors and how the distance will be measured within the feature space. Clustering is one special case of this where the importance of each predictor is considered to be equivalent.
