Any of a family of possible ways of measuring distance. Euclidean distance, a member of this family, computes straight – Line distances by squaring differences in like coordinates, summing them, and taking the square root of the sum. In mass appraisal model building, Minkowski metric usually refers to the sum of absolute differences (not squared) in each dimension, and resembles a “taxicab” or city block pattern. Other alternatives are possible, including the distance as calculated only for the dimension of greatest difference, but the city block distance is most common.
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