Classification of Mushroom Edibility Using K-Nearest Neighbors: A Machine Learning Approach

This study investigates the use of the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm for the binary classification of mushroom edibility using a cleaned version of the UCI Mushroom Dataset. The dataset underwent pre-processing techniques such as modal imputation, one-hot encoding, z-score normalization, and feature selection to ensure data quality. The model was trained on 80% of the dataset and evaluated on the remaining 20%, achieving an overall accuracy of 99%. Evaluation metrics, including precision, recall, and F1-score, confirmed the model's effectiveness in distinguishing between edible and poisonous mushrooms, with minimal misclassification errors. Despite its high performance, the study identified scalability as a limitation due to the computational complexity of KNN, suggesting that future research should explore alternative algorithms for enhanced efficiency. This research underscores the importance of pre-processing and hyperparameter optimization in building reliable classification models for food safety applications.