Machine Learning in Java - Second Edition

Non-Euclidean distances

A non-Euclidean distance is based on the properties of the elements, but not on their location in space. Some well known distances are Jaccard distance, cosine distance, edit distance, and Hamming distance.

Jaccard distance is used to compute the distance between two sets. First, we compute the Jaccard similarity of two sets as the size of their intersection divided by the size of their union, as follows:

The Jaccard distance is then defined as per the following formula:

Cosine distance between two vectors focuses on ...