The Distance Scoring process is one of a series of predictive modeling processes provided by JMP Clinical and JMP Genomics to help you make the best predictions for your system based on the data that you have collected and analyzed. Distance Scoring is a nonparametric discriminant method, which bases predictions for an
observation on distances between it and observations in a training set. When the
dependent variable is nominal, distances can optionally be computed from class centroids. Special cases of this process include
Diagonal Linear Discriminant Analysis,
Nearest Centroids, and certain
K-Nearest Neighbor methods. A wide variety of distance metrics are available, as documented with
PROC DISTANCE in SAS/STAT.
As always, it is not easy to tell beforehand which predictive model best fits your data. You should, therefore, plan to run your data through several, if not all, of the predictive models to find out which
model works best. The
Cross Validation Model Comparison process is especially useful for this task. See
Cross Validation Model Comparison for more details.
The adsl_dii.sas7bdat data set, used in the following example, consists of 906 rows of individuals with 382 columns corresponding to data on these individuals. It was generated from the original nicardipine ADSL data set described in Nicardipine and is included with JMP Clinical
. This data set is partially shown below.