Question

The following attributes are measured for members of a herd of Asian elephants: weight, height, tusk length, trunk length, and ear area. Based on these measurements, what sort of similarity measure from Section 2.4 would you use to compare or group these elephants? Justify your answer and ex- plain any special circumstances. The possible similarity measures can be narrowed down to these: Euclidean distance, Hamming distance, simple matching coefficient, Jaccard coefficient, cosine similarity, and correlation.

Answer 1

Proximity measures should be used in order to measure similarity and dissimilarity among the attributes.  Grouping similarity attributes in a clusters together can used to compare elephant groups.

For example- Consider height.  Height of elephants can be measured and clustered together based on predefined attribute definition, then they are clustered together and classified them as similar.  

In this case the Euclidean method of measurement is considered to be the most relevant.