The Industrial Leap from KNN to ANN for Real-Time Recommendations
In the world of machine learning, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) is often one of the first algorithms taught. Its simplicity is elegant: to classify a new data point, find the $k$ training examples "nearest" to it and take a majority vote.\[^1] In recommendation systems, this translates to a powerful and intuitive concept: "people like you also liked..." (user-based collaborative filtering) or "people