MEASURES OF SIMILARITY AND

DISSIMILARITY
 Similarity measure between two objects is a numerical measure of the degree to which two
objects are alike .
 Dissimilarity measure between two objects is a numerical measure of the degree to which two
objects are different
TYPES OF ATTRIBUTES
 There are different types of attributes
 Binary : True/False
 Nominal: Examples: ID numbers, eye color, zip codes
 Ordinal: Examples: rankings (e.g., taste of potato chips on a scale from 1 ‐10), grades, height
in {tall, medium, short}
 Interval: Examples: calendar dates, temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
 Ratio: Examples: temperature in Kelvin, length, time, counts
PROXIMITY MEASURE FOR BINARY ATTRIBUTES
Object j

 A contingency table for binary data

Object i

 Distance measure for symmetric binary

variables:

 Distance measure for asymmetric binary

variables:

 Jaccard coefficient (similarity measure

for asymmetric binary variables):

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DISSIMILARITY BETWEEN BINARY VARIABLES

 Example
Name Gender Fever Cough Test-1 Test-2 Test-3 Test-4
Jack M Y N P N N N
Mary F Y N P N P N
Jim M Y P N N N N
 Gender is a symmetric attribute
 The remaining attributes are asymmetric binary
 Let the values Y and P be 1, and the value N 0

01
d ( jack , mary )   0.33
2 01
11
d ( jack , jim )   0.67
111
1 2
d ( jim , mary )   0.75
11 2 6
EXAMPLE:
DATA MATRIX AND DISSIMILARITY MATRIX

Data Matrix
x2 x4
point attribute1 attribute2
4 x1 1 2
x2 3 5
x3 2 0
x4 4 5
2 x1
Dissimilarity Matrix
(with Euclidean Distance)
x3
0 4 x1 x2 x3 x4
2
x1 0
x2 3.61 0
x3 5.1 5.1 0
x4 4.24 1 5.39 0
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DISTANCE ON NUMERIC DATA: MINKOWSKI
DISTANCE
 Minkowski distance: A popular distance measure

where i = (xi1, xi2, …, xip) and j = (xj1, xj2, …, xjp) are two p-
dimensional data objects, and h is the order (the distance so
defined is also called L-h norm)
 Properties
 d(i, j) > 0 if i ≠ j, and d(i, i) = 0 (Positive definiteness)
 d(i, j) = d(j, i) (Symmetry)
 d(i, j)  d(i, k) + d(k, j) (Triangle Inequality)
 A distance that satisfies these properties is a metric
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SPECIAL CASES OF MINKOWSKI DISTANCE

 h = 1: Manhattan (city block, L norm) distance

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 E.g., the Hamming distance: the number of bits that are different
between two binary vectors

d (i, j) | x  x |  | x  x | ... | x  x |
i1 j1 i2 j 2 ip jp

 h = 2: (L2 norm) Euclidean distance

d (i, j)  (| x  x |2  | x  x |2 ... | x  x |2 )
i1 j1 i2 j 2 ip jp

 h  . “supremum” (L norm, L norm) distance.

max 
 This is the maximum difference between any component
(attribute) of the vectors

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EXAMPLE: MINKOWSKI DISTANCE

Dissimilarity Matrices
point attribute 1 attribute 2 Manhattan (L1)
x1 1 2
L x1 x2 x3 x4
x2 3 5 x1 0
x3 2 0 x2 5 0
x4 4 5 x3 3 6 0
x4 6 1 7 0
Euclidean (L2)
x2 x4
L2 x1 x2 x3 x4
4 x1 0
x2 3.61 0
x3 2.24 5.1 0
x4 4.24 1 5.39 0

2 x1
Supremum
L x1 x2 x3 x4
x1 0
x2 3 0
x3 x3 2 5 0
0 2 4 x4 3 1 5 0 10
 ORDINAL VARIABLES

 An ordinal variable can be discrete or continuous

 Order is important, e.g., rank

 Can be treated like interval-scaled

rif {1,...,M f }
 replace xif by their rank
 map the range of each variable onto [0, 1] by replacing i-th
object in the f-th variable by
rif 1
zif 
M f 1

 compute the dissimilarity using methods for interval-scaled

variables
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