The Gower distance

Gower distance is a way to measure how different two things are when their features vary in type—such as numbers, categories, or yes/no answers. Unlike simple distance measures, it can handle mixed data types by standardizing each feature's difference, so all are comparable. The overall Gower distance is then the average of these standardized differences, giving a single value that indicates how similar or different the two items are. A smaller Gower distance means the items are more similar; a larger distance indicates greater difference. It’s especially useful for datasets with diverse kinds of information.