1 /*
2 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
3 * contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
4 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
5 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
6 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
7 * the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
8 *
9 * https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
10 *
11 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
12 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
13 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
14 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
15 * limitations under the License.
16 */
17
18 /*
19 * This is not the original file distributed by the Apache Software Foundation
20 * It has been modified by the Hipparchus project
21 */
22 package org.hipparchus.clustering.distance;
23
24 import java.io.Serializable;
25
26 import org.hipparchus.exception.MathIllegalArgumentException;
27
28 /**
29 * Interface for distance measures of n-dimensional vectors.
30 *
31 */
32 public interface DistanceMeasure extends Serializable {
33
34 /**
35 * Compute the distance between two n-dimensional vectors.
36 * <p>
37 * The two vectors are required to have the same dimension.
38 *
39 * @param a the first vector
40 * @param b the second vector
41 * @return the distance between the two vectors
42 * @throws MathIllegalArgumentException if the array lengths differ.
43 */
44 double compute(double[] a, double[] b) throws MathIllegalArgumentException;
45 }