Calculating Euclidean Distance in R to Get the Distance between Rows

In mathematics, the euclidean distance between any two points is described as the length of the line segments between them, It is also known as the straight line distance. The Euclidean distance between any two-row vectors A and B of the matrix can be given by the following formula,

Euclidean distance = √Σ(vect1i - vect2i)2 

Where ,

• vect1 is the first vector
• vect2 is the second vector

Output:

     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    5    9
[2,]    2    6   10
[3,]    3    7   11
[4,]    4    8   12
[1] "Euclidean Distance between rows of matrix"
         1        2        3
2 1.732051                  
3 3.464102 1.732051         
4 5.196152 3.464102 1.732051

Explanation : 

• The Euclidean distance between row1 and row2 is 1.732051
• The Euclidean distance between row1 and row3 is 3.464102
• The Euclidean distance between row1 and row4 is 5.196152
• The Euclidean distance between row2 and row2 is 0
• The Euclidean distance between row2 and row3 is 1.732051
• The Euclidean distance between row2 and row4 is 3.464102
• The Euclidean distance between row3 and row3 is 0
• The Euclidean distance between row3 and row4 is 1.732051

In this article, we will learn various approaches to calculating the distance between the given rows in the R programming language.

The dist() function in R is used to calculate a wide range of distances between the specified vector elements of the matrix in R. The default method for distance computation is the “Euclidean distance,” which is widely used in mathematics. It has the following syntax :

Syntax: dist(vect, method = ” “, diag = TRUE or FALSE, upper = TRUE or FALSE)

Parameters:

• vect: A two-dimensional vector
• method: The distance to be measured. It must be equal to one of these, “euclidean”, “maximum”, “manhattan”, “canberra”, “binary” or “minkowski”
• diag: logical value (TRUE or FALSE) that conveys whether the diagonal of the distance matrix should be printed by print.dist or not.
• upper: logical value (TRUE or FALSE) that conveys whether the upper triangle of the distance matrix should be printed by print.dist or not.

Return type:

It return an object of class “dist”