# How does caret resolve ties in the KNN classification? [closed]

I have a multi-class classification problem, in which I'm using caret package k nearest neighbour classifier, (4 classes), which means that an odd number for k won't prevent classification ties.

So how does caret resolve ties in the k nearest neighbour classification?

## closed as off-topic by Michael Chernick, Peter Flom♦Jun 10 at 13:54

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• In these cases, reading the relevant relevant help files is often the fastest solution. Also, I am not sure that caret is doing the nearest neighbor match. It is usually a wrapper around functions in other packages. – lmo Jun 9 at 22:00

It appears that manual page doesn't state it explicitly. But, a close inspection of the source code reveals that it chooses the class randomly, via sample method in R. I've managed to reproduce the iris dataset example in the above linked man-page using 2 neighbours. It results in different class assignments under different runs (see the 75-th test example).