gower: gower_dist – R documentation

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gower_dist

Gower's distance

Description

Compute Gower's distance, pairwise between records in two data sets x and y. Records from the smallest data set are recycled over.

Usage

gower_dist(
  x,
  y,
  pair_x = NULL,
  pair_y = NULL,
  eps = 1e-08,
  weights = NULL,
  ignore_case = FALSE,
  nthread = getOption("gd_num_thread")
)

Arguments

`x`	`[data.frame]`
`y`	`[data.frame]`
`pair_x`	`[numeric\|character] (optional)` Columns in `x` used for comparison. See Details below.
`pair_y`	`[numeric\|character] (optional)` Columns in `y` used for comparison. See Details below.
`eps`	`[numeric] (optional)` Computed numbers (variable ranges) smaller than `eps` are treated as zero.
`weights`	`[numeric] (optional)` A vector of weights of length `ncol(x)` that defines the weight applied to each component of the gower distance.
`ignore_case`	`[logical]` Toggle ignore case when neither `pair_x` nor `pair_y` are user-defined.
`nthread`	Number of threads to use for parallelization. By default, for a dual-core machine, 2 threads are used. For any other machine n-1 cores are used so your machine doesn't freeze during a big computation. The maximum nr of threads are determined using `omp_get_max_threads` at C level.

Value

A numeric vector of length max(nrow(x),nrow(y)). When there are no columns to compare, a message is printed and both numeric(0) is returned invisibly.

Details

There are three ways to specify which columns of x should be compared with what columns of y. The first option is do give no specification. In that case columns with matching names will be used. The second option is to use only the pairs_y argument, specifying for each column in x in order, which column in y must be used to pair it with (use 0 to skip a column in x). The third option is to explicitly specify the columns to be matched using pair_x and pair_y.

Note

Gower (1971) originally defined a similarity measure (s, say) with values ranging from 0 (completely dissimilar) to 1 (completely similar). The distance returned here equals 1-s.

References

Gower, John C. "A general coefficient of similarity and some of its properties." Biometrics (1971): 857-871.