Explain why computing the proximity between two attributes is often simpler than computing the similarity between two objects.

What will be an ideal response?

In general, an object can be a record whose fields (attributes) are of different
types. To compute the overall similarity of two objects in this case, we need
to decide how to compute the similarity for each attribute and then combine
these similarities. This can be done straightforwardly by using Equations 2.15
or 2.16, but is still somewhat ad hoc, at least compared to proximity measures

such as the Euclidean distance or correlation, which are mathematically well-
founded. In contrast, the values of an attribute are all of the same type,
and thus, if another attribute is of the same type, then the computation of
similarity is conceptually and computationally straightforward.