# Error in Matlab’s Mahalanobis distance?

First, some notation:

• $X$ is an $m$-by-$n$ input matrix with each row corresponding to an observation, each column a variable.
• $X_s$ denotes row $s$ of $X$.
• $X_{,i}$ denotes column $i$ of $X$.

Now that that’s out of the way…the Matlab statistics package has a function called pdist.m which is used in multidimensional scaling of  multivariable datasets. One of the available distance metrics is the “mahalanobis” distance metric, (nicely elaborated upon here). In pdist.m, it’s defined as a dissimilarity measure between each pair of observations $X_s$ and $X_t$ in the $m$-by-$n$ input matrix $X$ with each row corresponding to an observation, each column a variable.

That is, element $st$ of the mahalanobis distance matrix $D_{st}$ measures the mahalanobis distance between row $s$ and $t$ of $X$,

$D_{st}^2 = D_{ts}^2= \sum_{p=1}^n\left((X_{sp}-X{tp}) * C^{-1} *(X_{sp}-X{tp})\right),$

where $C$ is the ($n$-by-$n$) covariance matrix of $X$.

I checked it using two methods:

• Is the mahalanobis distance computed using an identity covariance matrix equal to the euclidean distance?
• Is the mahalanobis distance equal to what we’d get from matrix-matrix multiplication as specified in the formula for $D_{st}$ above.
• In both cases, the answer was no.

Code I used:

% Initialize x.
clear all;
ln = 100;
x(:,1) = 1:ln;
x(:,2) = sin(1:ln);
x(:,3) = (1:ln).^2;
x(:,4) = cos(1:ln);

% This is what Matlab's pdist.m computes
'Malahanobis distance from Matlab pdist'
Y = squareform(pdist(x,'mahalanobis'));
Y(1:10,1:10)

% By definition, the Mahalanobis distance matrix should reduce to the
% Euclidian distance matrix if the covariance matrix is equal to
% the identity.

% Let's check this:
'Mahalanobis with covariance = identity matrix'
mahaIdentity = squareform(pdist(x,'mahalanobis',eye(4)));
mahaIdentity(1:10,1:10)
'Euclidean distance matrix'
euclid = squareform(pdist(x,'euclidean'));
euclid(1:10,1:10)
% It isn't(!!) In fact, it's ignoring the input covariance
% matrix and returning the same mahalanobis distance computed using pdist(x,'mahalanobis').

% What *should* the mahalanobis distance be then?

% First, compute the inverse covariance of x
icovx = cov(x) \ eye(4);
% Then compute the mahalanobis distance.
for(r1=1:ln) %for each row
for(r2 = r1+1:ln) % for all combinations of rows
dist = (x(r1,:) - x(r2,:)).^2*diag(icovx); %get the distance
maha(r1,r2) = sqrt(dist); %take the square root
maha(r2,r1) = maha(r1,r2);
end
end
% This is what it should be.
'Mahalanobis from matrix-matrix multiplication'
maha(1:10,1:10)


Feel free to let me know if I’ve got things wrong though.
In the meantime, feel free to use this code snippet:

icovx = cov(x) \ eye(size(x,2)); // inverse cov(x)
for(r1=1:ln) %for each row
for(r2 = r1+1:ln) % for all combinations of rows
dist = (x(r1,:) - x(r2,:)).^2*diag(icovx); %get the distance
maha(r1,r2) = sqrt(dist); %take the square root
maha(r2,r1) = maha(r1,r2);
end
end