How many kinds of Distance Function can we use?

Question

I was reading stuffs about pattern recognition. Recently I want to make a survey of methods to evaluate similarities of vectors. As far as I know, there are Euclidean distances, Mahalanobis distances and Cosine Distance. Can anyone present some more names or keywords to search?

Answer 1

Also mutual neighbor distance (MND), Minkowski metric, Hausdorff distance, conceptual similarity, normalized Google distance, KL divergence, Spearman’s rank correlation, and Lin similarity. (Not all of these are vector based.)

I highly recommend Pattern Classification by Duda, Hart, and Stork for further reading. It is extensively cited.