1
$\begingroup$

I am trying to find a similarity measure for a very specific problem.

I have a list of cities that have some characteritisques. For example bilingual school, firemen stations, etc. These cities are represented as binary vectors where each element corresponds to a characteristic.

On the other side I have possible citizens. The citizens give a punctuation between 0 and 1 to the importance they give to each of the characteristics in the cities.

So I could have : Citizen 1 = {0.83, 0.3, 0, 1}

City 1 = {1, 0, 0, 1} City 2 = {1, 0, 1, 1}

I would like to find the best city for each citizen. The important thing would be to find cities with a 1 in the characteristics that the citizen cares about and we don't mind if the city has a zero when the citizen did not care or not care much ( less weight or not weight at all if the citizen does not care)

I have tried some distance (eg hamming, cosine) but they give weight when the citizen and the city have both zero in the same characteristic.

what would be a good similarity to use in this case?

Thanks

$\endgroup$

1 Answer 1

2
$\begingroup$

I assume by "similarity" you mean some score that measures how well a given city matches a given citizen. Think of each weight as the extent to which a citizen is happy when a city has the corresponding feature, or unhappy when it doesn't. Assuming happiness and unhappiness are both proportional to the weight, here's one possible score you could use:

Let binary vector $x = [x_1, \dots, x_n]$ represent a city, where $x_i \in \{0, 1\}$ denotes whether or not the city has feature $i$. Let weight vector $w = [w_1, \dots, w_n]$ represent the preferences of a citizen, where $w_i \in [0, 1]$ denotes how much the citizen cares about the presence of feature $i$. For each feature, we add happiness $w_i$ when feature $i$ is present, and subtract happiness $w_i$ when feature $i$ is absent. The happiness of the citizen with the city is then given by the dot product:

$$h(x, w) = w \cdot (2x - 1)$$

Of course, $2x-1$ is simply a copy of $x$ with the zeros replaced by negative ones. Since $h$ is a simple dot product, you could easily relate it to Euclidean or cosine distance if you were so inclined.

$\endgroup$
2
  • $\begingroup$ Hi,I have tried cosine and euclidean but they take into account when the citizen gives zero or low points to a characteristic.If the citizen did not give importantce to one characteristic, I would like to give it weight or little weight in the final outcome. I want to be ignored or more or less to be ignored whether the city has it or not. I $\endgroup$ Jun 15, 2018 at 10:02
  • $\begingroup$ $h$ as I described it should have the properties you want. What I mean about Euclidean/cosine distance is not that you should use Euclidean/cosine distance between the original $x$ and $w$ (clearly they won't have the desired properties). Rather, because all of these measures contain dot products between $w$ and $x$, it's easy to derive expressions that relate them. $\endgroup$
    – user20160
    Jun 15, 2018 at 10:18

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.