KNN in R -- All arguments must have the same length, test.X is empty - r

Question

I'm trying to perform KNN in R on a dataframe, following 3-way classification for vehicle types (car, boat, plane), using columns such as mpg, cost as features.
To start, when I run:
knn.pred=knn(train.X,test.X,train.VehicleType,k=3)
then
knn.pred
returns
factor(0) Levels: car boat plane
And
table(knn.pred,VehicleType.All)
returns
Error in table(knn.pred, VehicleType.All) :
all arguments must have the same length
I think my problem is that I can successfully load train.X with cbind() but when I try the same for test.X it remains an empty matrix. My code looks like this:
train=(DATA$Values<=200) # to train for all 200 entries including cars, boats and planes
train.X = cbind(DATA$mpg,DATA$cost)[train,]
summary(train.X)
Here, summary(train.X) returns correctly, but when I try the same for test.X:
test.X = cbind(DATA$mpg,DATA$cost)[!train,]
When I try and print test.X it returns an empty matrix like so:
[,1] [,2]
Apologies for such a long question and I'm probably not including all relevant info. If anyone has any idea what's going wrong here or why my test.X isn't loading through any data I'd appreciate it!

Answer 1

Without any info on your data, it is hard to guess where the problem is. You should post a minimal reproducible example
or at least dput your data or part of it. However here I show 2 methods for training a knn model, using 2 different package (class, and caret) with the mtcars built-in dataset.
with class
library(class)
data("mtcars")
str(mtcars)
mtcars$gear <- as.factor(mtcars$gear)
ind <- sample(1:nrow(mtcars),20)
train.X <- mtcars[ind,]
test.X <- mtcars[-ind,]
train.VehicleType <- train.X[,"gear"]
VehicleType.All <- test.X[,"gear"]
knn.pred=knn(train.X,test.X,train.VehicleType,k=3)
table(knn.pred,VehicleType.All)
with caret
library(caret)
ind <- createDataPartition(mtcars$gear,p=0.60,list=F)
train.X <- mtcars[ind,]
test.X <- mtcars[-ind,]
control <-trainControl(method = "cv",number = 10)
grid <- expand.grid(k=2:10)
knn.pred <- train(gear~.,data=train.X,method="knn",tuneGrid=grid)
pred <- predict(knn.pred,test.X[,-10])
cm <- confusionMatrix(pred,test.X$gear)
the caret package allows performing cross-validation for parameters tuning during model fitting, in a straightforward way. By default train perform a 25 rep bootstrap cross-validation to find the best value of k among the values I've supplied in the grid object.
From your example, it seems that your test object is empty so the result of knn is a 0-length vector. Probably your problem is in the data reading. However, a better way to subset your DATA can be this:
#insetad of
train.X = cbind(DATA$mpg,DATA$cost)[train,]
#you should do:
train.X <- DATA[train,c("mpg","cost")]
test.X <- DATA[-train,c("mpg","cost")]
However, I do not understand what variable is DATA$Values, Firstly I was thinking it was the outcome, but, this line confused me a lot:
train=(DATA$Values<=200)
You can work on these examples to catch your error on your own. If you can't post an example that reproduces your situation.