Gower Distance

Gower distance is a versatile metric for comparing observations with mixed variable types (continuous, ordinal, categorical, and binary). Introduced by John C. Gower in 1971, this similarity coefficient computes a general measure that ranges from 0 (completely dissimilar) to 1 (identical). It automatically scales variables to a common unit and handles missing values gracefully, making it ideal for clustering and classification on heterogeneous datasets.