Create a Distance Function Object — create

Constructs a generic distance function object, storing:

name: The name (method) of the distance (e.g., "euclidean", "cordist", "mahalanobis").
labels: (Optional) a vector of labels associated with the data rows.
...: Additional parameters relevant to the specific distance method (e.g., correlation method for cordist, number of components for pcadist, etc.).

Usage

create_dist(name, labels = NULL, ...)

Arguments

name: A character string specifying the distance method (e.g., "euclidean", "cordist").
labels: A vector of row labels (optional), primarily for informational/reference purposes.
...: Additional parameters for the distance method (e.g. `method="pearson"` for correlation, or whiten=TRUE for PCA-based distances).

Value

An S3 object with class c(name, "distfun") that can be passed to pairwise_dist().

Details

This object is used by pairwise_dist() to compute an N x N matrix of pairwise distances between rows of a data matrix.

The distance function object itself does not exclude same-block comparisons or reorder rows by label. Those tasks (if needed) are handled downstream (for example, in second_order_similarity).

Examples

# Create a Euclidean distance function object
dist_obj_euc <- create_dist("euclidean")

# Create a correlation distance function object with a specified correlation method
dist_obj_cor <- create_dist("cordist", method="spearman")