Answer to Question #315466 in Statistics and Probability for Bless

Question

The following attributes are measured for members of a herd of Asian elephants:

weight, height, tusk length, trunk length, and ear area. Based on these

measurements, what sort of similarity measure from Section 2.4 would you use

to compare or group these elephants? Justify your answer and explain any

special circumstances.

Answer 1

The attributes of the Asian elephant that are listed in the question are qualities of the ratio data. in this case all the attributes listed of Asian elephant have different measuring scales for example weight is measured in kilograms height and tusk length are measured in meters and ear area is measured in square meters. Thus all attributes are numerical but all differ depending on their measurement scale. The Mahalanobis distance method is used to normalize the data on measuring basis, this measuring method calculates the distance between two points x and y in the form of vector.

Mahalanobis(x,y) = (x-y)Σ-1(x-y)T