Application of heterogeneous value difference metric on MDS algorithm

In general,Multidimensional Scaling(MDS) uses Euclidean distance to measure the dissimilarity(similarity) of objects.If objects have nominal attributes,such as sex or color,common practice is digitizing first and then applying Euclidean distance.Obviously,this approach is not reasonable to some extents.The Heterogeneous Value Difference Metric(HVDM),a distance metric computing distance for nominal attributes differently than Euclidean distance,is applied to MDS to improve its reasonableness on nominal attributes.Experimental results on UCI Abalone dataset show that the proposed method gives promising results on both reconstruction ability and accuracy.