What is Similarity?

About

Simliarity is determined as being the closest distance between 2 objects in a set.

You can find similarities by looking at:

• the metadata:
  • Were they created at roughly the same time?
  • Do they tend to get the same ratings?
• user behavior (browsing, playing, searching)

What’s similar depends on who you’re talking about. Take director Pedro Almodóvar. You might have four very different movies by Almodóvar. But he’s such a strong voice that, by himself, he makes those videos similar to one another. For a different director—say, Spielberg—that might not be the case.

Similarity is a symmetric function.

Function

• Regular (“Euclidean”) distance? (sum of squares of differences). Regular Euclidean distance: normally the square root but as we compare only two instances we don't need to take the square root
• Manhattan (“city‐block”) distance? (sum of absolute differences)
• Nominal attributes? Distance = 1 if different, 0 if same
• What is the Cosine Similarity or Cosine Distance? (Measure of Angle) String similarity Product of vector by the cosinus