What Is The Euclidean Distance?

knowledge euclidThe Euclidean distance between two points in a Euclidean space is the length of a segment between those two points.

Mathematically:

Given two points p and q in a Euclidean space of dimension n, with coordinates (p1, p2, … , pn) and (q1, q2, … , qn), the Euclidean distance between them is defined as:

euclidean_distance_formula

As this formula and the figure below shows, the Euclidean distance can be calculated via the Pythagorean theorem.

pythagorean_theorem

Figure 1: Pythagorean theorem.

Source: Kmhkmh, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Euclidean distance has many important properties. Among them are:

  1. Symmetry:

Given two points p and q, then d(p,q) = d(q,p)

  1. Positive:

The value of the Euclidean distance between two points is always a positive number.

  1. Triangle Equality:

Given three points p, q and r, then d(p,q) + d(q,r) ≥ d(p,r)

In machine learning, the Euclidean distance is just one of the four distance measures used between a pair of samples p and q in an n-dimensional feature space. The other three are the Manhattan distance, the Minkowski distance, and the Hamming distance. Of the four distances, the Euclidean gives the shortest value between any two points.

 

Why Is Distance Effective?

Many machine learning algorithms use the Euclidean distance to measure the similarity between observations and supervised and unsupervised learning. Commonly known algorithms that use it are the K-nearest neighbors (classification) and K-means (clustering), which estimate distances to find the k-closest points. It is also used in hierarchical clustering and agglomerative clustering to calculate the distances between clusters.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) can calculate Euclidean distances in cases where the direct evaluation process becomes very complicated.

 

Euclidean Distance and LogicPlum

LogicPlum’s platform is used to find the best fitting model for a given dataset. This task is automatically done by the platform’s engine, ensuring that all potential algorithms are tried and tested.

Many of these algorithms use Euclidean distance and other mathematical artifacts. However, as these estimations are automatically done by the platform, users don’t need in-depth scientific knowledge to find optimal models.

Additional Resources
https://logicplum.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Group.png

LogicPlum builds and co-manages AI solutions that make sense for your business vision, mission, and financial goals.

We are living carbon neutral by Nul.

img

img

img

img

Demo
Want to see our AI solutions in action? Request a demo and get started right now.

Featured in Trusted Publications

https://logicplum.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Forbes-Logo.png
https://logicplum.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/entre-logo.png
https://logicplum.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/inside-logo.png
https://logicplum.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/inory-logo.png
https://logicplum.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/ceo-logo.png

© 2023 LogicPlum. All Rights Reserved.