CONSTRUCTING DISSIMILARITY MEASURES

The paper addresses the problem of specifying differential weights for variables in the construction of a measure of dissimilarity. An assessor is required to provide subjective judgments of the pairwise dissimilarities within a training set of objects, and these dissimilarities are then modeled as a function of the recorded differences between the objects on each of the variables. The aim is to make explicit the relative importance that assessors attach to each of the variables, and thus obtain guidance on how these variables should be combined into a relevant dissimilarity matrix. The methodology is illustrated by application to some archaeological data. © 1990 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.