Measure similarity of objects over a period of time - math

Question

I've got a dataset that has monthly metrics for different stores. Each store has three monthly (Total sales, customers and transaction count), my task is over a year I need to find the store that most closely matches a specific test store (Ex: Store 77).
Therefore over the year both the test store and most similar store need to have similar performance. My question is how do I go about finding the most similar store? I've currently used euclidean distance but would like to know if there's a better way to go about it.
Thanks in advance
STORE
month
Metric 1
22
Jan-18
10
23
Jan-18
20
Is correlation a better way to measure similarity in this case compared to distance? I'm fairly new to data so if there's any resources where I can learn more about this stuff it would be much appreciated!!

Answer 1

In general, deciding similarity of items is domain-specific, i.e. it depends on the problem you try to solve. Therefore, there is not one-size-fits-all solution. Nevertheless, there is some a basic procedure someone can follow trying to solve this kind of problems.
Case 1 - only distance matters:
If you want to find the most similar items (stores in our case) using a distance measure, it's a good tactic to firstly scale your features in some way.
Example (min-max normalization):
Store
Month
Total sales
Total sales (normalized)
1
Jan-18
50
0.64
2
Jan-18
40
0.45
3
Jan-18
70
0
4
Jan-18
15
1
After you apply normalization on all attributes, you can calculate euclidean distance or any other metric that you think it fits your data.
Some resources:
Similarity measures
Feature scaling
Case 2 - Trend matters:
Now, say that you want to find the similarity over the whole year. If the definition of similarity for your problem is just the instance of the stores at the end of the year, then distance will do the job.
But if you want to find similar trends of increase/decrease of the attributes of two stores, then distance measures conceal this information. You would have to use correlation metrics or any other more sophisticated technique than just a distance.
Simple example:
To keep it simple, let's say we are interested in 3-months analysis and that we use only sales attribute (unscaled):
Store
Month
Total sales
1
Jan-18
20
1
Feb-18
20
1
Mar-18
20
2
Jan-18
5
2
Feb-18
15
2
Mar-18
40
3
Jan-18
10
3
Feb-18
30
3
Mar-18
78
At the end of March, in terms of distance Store 1 and Store 2 are identical, both having 60 total sales.
But, as far as the increase ratio per month is concerned, Store 2 and Store 3 is our match. In February they both had 2 times more sales and in March 1.67 and 1.6 times more sales respectively.
Bottom line: It really depends on what you want to quantify.
Well-known correlation metrics:
Pearson correlation coefficient
Spearman correlation coefficient