One dimensional Mahalanobis Distance in Python

Question

I\'ve been trying to validate my code to calculate Mahalanobis distance written in Python (and double check to compare the res

Answer 1

One-dimensional Mahalanobis distance is really easy to calculate manually:

import numpy as np
s = np.array([[20], [123], [113], [103], [123]])
std = s.std()
print np.abs(s[0] - s[1]) / std

(reducing the formula to the one-dimensional case).

But the problem with scipy.spatial.distance is that for some reason np.cov returns a scalar, i.e. a zero-dimensional array, when given a set of 1d variables. You want to pass in a 2d array:

>>> covar = np.cov(s, rowvar=0)

>>> covar.shape
()

>>> invcovar = np.linalg.inv(covar.reshape((1,1)))

>>> invcovar.shape
(1, 1)

>>> mahalanobis(s[0], s[1], invcovar)
2.3674720531046645