Distance calculation/vector range significance
I created a scoring system ("Thomas Scoring System") to deal with this problem.  If you treat "distance" as a similarity score, this system should work for you. http://exploringpossibilityspace.blogspot.com/2014/02/thomas-scoring-system.html


  Here's Thomas Scoring System (TSS) in a nutshell: Treat each metric and their values as evidence that weigh for or against specific values in the performance index. This is an inference process and not an arithmetic calculation, as in the Usual Method. The output of TSS is an estimation of the Weight of Evidence for all index values.  The Weight of Evidence can be expressed as a probability distribution, where all the evidence weights sum to one.


To use your example, each range is a condition: A) 10 &lt;= x &lt;= 22; and B) x &lt; 10. If A is true, then it weighs in favor of certain similarity (distance) scores.  If B is true, then it weights in favor of other similarity (distance) scores, but would have less weight compared to other evidence.