Most efficient way to construct similarity matrix

Question

I\'m using the following links to create a \"Euclidean Similarity Matrix\" (that I convert to a DataFrame). https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/53068/euclidean-distan

Answer 1

There are two useful function within scipy.spatial.distance that you can use for this: pdist and squareform. Using pdist will give you the pairwise distance between observations as a one-dimensional array, and squareform will convert this to a distance matrix.

One catch is that pdist uses distance measures by default, and not similarity, so you'll need to manually specify your similarity function. Judging by the commented output in your code, your DataFrame is also not in the orientation pdist expects, so I've undone the transpose you did in your code.

import pandas as pd
from scipy.spatial.distance import euclidean, pdist, squareform


def similarity_func(u, v):
    return 1/(1+euclidean(u,v))

DF_var = pd.DataFrame.from_dict({"s1":[1.2,3.4,10.2],"s2":[1.4,3.1,10.7],"s3":[2.1,3.7,11.3],"s4":[1.5,3.2,10.9]})
DF_var.index = ["g1","g2","g3"]

dists = pdist(DF_var, similarity_func)
DF_euclid = pd.DataFrame(squareform(dists), columns=DF_var.index, index=DF_var.index)