Traditional Mahalanobis distance is a generalized distance, which can be considered a measure of the degree of similarity (or divergence) in the mean values of multiple characteristics of a population, considering the correlation among the characteristics. It has been used for many year in clustering classification and discriminant analysis. Mahalanobis distance is attributable to Prof.P.C. Mahalanobis , founder of the Indian Statistics Institute some 60 years ago. Mahalanobis distance has been used for various types of pattern recognition, e.g. inspection systems, face and voice recognition systems , counterfeit detection systems, etc. The URL from SAS shown here displays data published by Fisher (1936) and cluster analysis, where classification into three predetermined categories is …
[Read more...] about Mahalanobis distance and reliability methods