Improved Heterogeneous Distance Functions
  Instance-based learning techniques typically handle continuous and linear
input values well, but often do not handle nominal input attributes
appropriately. The Value Difference Metric (VDM) was designed to find
reasonable distance values between nominal attribute values, but it largely
ignores continuous attributes, requiring discretization to map continuous
values into nominal values. This paper proposes three new heterogeneous
distance functions, called the Heterogeneous Value Difference Metric (HVDM),
the Interpolated Value Difference Metric (IVDM), and the Windowed Value
Difference Metric (WVDM). These new distance functions are designed to handle
applications with nominal attributes, continuous attributes, or both. In
experiments on 48 applications the new distance metrics achieve higher
classification accuracy on average than three previous distance functions on
those datasets that have both nominal and continuous attributes.
