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The equivalence (2)$\iff$(3) was announced by Preiss (1983), while a detailed proof of the implication (3)$\Rightarrow$(2) has only appeared in Assouad and Quentin de Gromard (2006). The implication (2)$\Rightarrow$(1) was established by Cérou and Guyader (2006). We prove the implication (1)$\Rightarrow$(3). We further show that the weak (instead of strong) Lebesgue--Besicovitch property is insufficient for the consistency of the $k$-NN rule, as witnessed, for example, by the Heisenberg group (here we correct a wrong claim made in the previous article (Kumari and Pestov 2024)). A bit counter-intuitively, there is a metric on the real line uniformly equivalent to the usual distance but under which the $k$-NN classifier fails. Finally, another equivalent condition that can be added to the above is the Cover--Hart property: (4) the error of the $1$-nearest neighbour classifier is asymptotically at most twice as bad as the Bayes error.
From: Vladimir Pestov [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 18 Dec 2025 20:49:44 UTC (19 KB)
[v2]
Thu, 5 Feb 2026 19:42:46 UTC (30 KB)
[v3]
Thu, 4 Jun 2026 21:31:12 UTC (134 KB)
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