com.aliasi.matrix
Class MinkowskiDistance

java.lang.Object
  com.aliasi.matrix.MinkowskiDistance

All Implemented Interfaces:

Distance<Vector>, Serializable

public class MinkowskiDistance
extends Object
implements Distance<Vector>, Serializable

The MinkowskiDistance class implements Minkowski distance of a fixed order between vectors. or Manhattan distance between vectors. Minkowski distance of any order forms a metric. The Minkowski distance of order p is often called Lp or the p-norm distance.

Minkowski distance generalizes taxicab and Euclidean distance, which are just the Minkowski distances of order 1 and 2 respectively. For orders 1 and 2, the taxicab and Euclidean distance classes TaxicabDistance and EuclideanDistance are more efficient in that they do not require exponentiation to be calculated.

The definition of Minkowski distance of order p over vectors v1 and v2 is:

 distance(v1,v2,p) = (Σi abs(v1[i] - v2[i])p)(1/p)

with v1[i] standing for the method call v1.value(i) and i ranging over the dimensions of the vectors, which must be the same.

An understandable explanation of the Minkowski distances, including the special cases of Taxicab (L1 norm) and Euclidean (L2 norm) may be found at:

• Wikipedia: Distance in Euclidean Space

Since:

LingPipe3.1

Version:

3.8

Author:

Bob Carpenter

See Also:

Serialized Form

Constructor Summary

MinkowskiDistance(int order)
Construct a new Minkowski distance of the specified order.

Method Summary

double	distance(Vector v1, Vector v2) Returns the Minkowski distance between the specified pair of vectors.
int	order() Returns the order of this Minkowski distance.

Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object

clone, equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait

Constructor Detail

MinkowskiDistance

public MinkowskiDistance(int order)

Construct a new Minkowski distance of the specified order.

Parameters:

order - Order of metric.

Throws:

IllegalArgumentException - If the order is not 1 or greater.

Method Detail

order

public int order()

Returns the order of this Minkowski distance.

Returns:

The order of this Minkowski distance.

distance

public double distance(Vector v1,
                       Vector v2)

Returns the Minkowski distance between the specified pair of vectors.

Specified by:

distance in interface Distance<Vector>

Parameters:

v1 - First vector.

v2 - Second vector.

Returns:

The distance between the vectors.

Throws:

IllegalArgumentException - If the vectors are not of the same dimensionality.