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At first: I have individuals represented by vectors with four entries/properties:

Individual1:
Height Age Blood Gender
  171  24    A     w
Individual2:
Height Age Blood Gender
  179  21    B     m
Individual3:
Height Age Blood Gender
  181  33    B     w
(..)

It's just an arbitrary example but assume I want to measure similarities between two individuals across the whole pool. This means comparing Individual1 with Individual2, Individual3 with Individual4 and so on. Therefore I want to use the Mahalanobis distance to measure the distance between vectors:

Equation

The question is: Does the covariance matrix consist of the two individuals x and y or of the whole pool of individuals? I can't find a clear answer anyhwere..

Ben
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    Do you instead mean "Does each entry of the covariance matrix consist [...]? What does bother you, I guess, is that you do not understand how a point can have $n$ counterparts of himself, doesn't it? – keepAlive Nov 25 '17 at 16:42

0 Answers0