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Similarity Measures

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Machine Learning

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Synonyms

Distance; Distance metrics; Distance functions; Distance measures

Definition

The term similarity measure refers to a function that is used for comparing objects of any type. The objects can be data structures, database records, or even multimedia objects (audio, video, etc.). Therefore, the input of a similarity measure is two objects and the output is, in general, a number between 0 and 1; “zero” meaning that the objects are completely dissimilar and “one” signifying that the two objects are identical. Similarity is related to distance, which is the inverse of similarity. That is, a similarity of 1 implies a distance of 0 between two objects.

Motivation and Background

Similarity measures are typically used for quantifying the affinity between objects in search operations, where the user presents an object (query) and requests other objects “similar” to the given query. Therefore, a similarity measure is a mathematical abstraction for comparing objects, assigning a single...

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Recommended Reading

  • Agrawal, R., Faloutsos, C., & Swami, A. (1993). Efficient similarity search in sequence databases. In Proceedings of foundations of data organization and algorithms (FODO), (pp. 69–84). Chicago, Illinois, USA.

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  • Keogh, E., Lonardi, S., & Ratanamahatana, A. (2004). Towards parameter-free data mining. Proceedings of International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) (pp. 206–215). Seattle, Washington, USA.

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  • Li, M., Chen, X., Li, X., Ma, B., & Vitanyi, P. M. B. (2004). The similarity metric. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 50(12), 3250–3264.

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  • Zezula, P., Amato, G., Dohnal, V., & Batko, M. (2005). Similarity search: the metric approach. Advances in Database Systems, Springer.

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Authors and Affiliations

    Authors
    1. Michail Vlachos
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    Editor information

    Editors and Affiliations

    1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052

      Claude Sammut

    2. Faculty of Information Technology, Clayton School of Information Technology, Monash University, P.O. Box 63, Victoria, Australia, 3800

      Geoffrey I. Webb

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    © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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    Vlachos, M. (2011). Similarity Measures. In: Sammut, C., Webb, G.I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Machine Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30164-8_760

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