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machine-learningvectordistanceknneuclidean-distance

distance measure used to calculate k nearest neighbour


I am reading about k nearest neighbour, and the distance measure given in the example is as below.

It says Ri is the range of the i-th component. I am confused about which distance measure is used here? I understand Euclidean Distance but this doesn't seem to be it. Could you help to explain what "range of the i-th component" is and which distance measure is this? Many thanks. Please let me know if more information is needed.

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Solution

  • Range is difference between max and min of that feature (column) in the training dataset.

    You can think about this as L1 norm since we are taking just the absolute distance between the max and min. This is commonly done to normalize the distance calculation across features so that some feature should not dominate the distance calculation.