Clustering on mixed type data – Towards Data Science

Distance is a numerical measurement of how far apart individuals are, i.e. a metrics used to measure proximity or similarity across individuals. Many distance metrics exist, and one is actually quite useful to crack our case, the Gower distance (1971). Gower distance is computed as the average of partial dissimilarities across individuals. Partial dissimilarities (d_ij f) computation depend on the type of variable being evaluated. This implies that a particular standardization will be applied to each feature, and the distance between two individuals is the average of all feature-specific distances.