similarity metric for two characteristics I am trying to develop a way to compare items. Each item has the same two properties associated with it, say, $p_{1}$ and $p_{2}$.
All I am given are these two measures for each item, each of which may be given as a range, say $x_{1} \le p_{1} \le x_{2}$ and $y_{1} \le p_{2} \le y_{2}$.
Do you think that something like a Euclidean distance for two items under comparison would make sense?
For two items, say, $a$ and $b$, that metric might be
$\sqrt((x_{1_a}-x_{1_b})^2 + (x_{2_a}-x_{2_b})^2 + (y_{1_a}-y_{1_b})^2 + (y_{2_a}-y_{2_b})^2)$
Thank you.

As usual, it depends on the type of properties that you are working. But in general, Euclidean distance is a great measure for distance between observations.
