Python | Calculate City Block Distance

City block distance is generally calculated between 2-coordinates of a paired object. It is the summation of absolute difference between 2-coordinates. The city block distance of 2-points a and b with k dimension is mathematically calculated using below formula: In this article two solution are explained for this problem - one with the Python code and the other one with the use of a predefined method. Examples:

Input: array1 = [1, 2, 13, 5] array2 = [1, 27, 3, 4] Output: The CityBlock distance between 2 array is: 36 Input: a = [34, 44, 89, 81, 67, 49, 33, 59] b = [98, 34, 23, 12, 233, 23, 44] Output: The CityBlock distance between 2 array is: 412

Code: Python scratch code to calculate the distance using the above formula. Python3 1==

import numpy as np

def cityblock_distance(A, B):

    result = np.sum([abs(a - b) for (a, b) in zip(A, B)])
    return result

if __name__== "__main__":

    array1 = [1, 2, 13, 5]
    array2 = [1, 27, 3, 4]

    result = cityblock_distance(array1, array2)

    print("The CityBlock distance between 2 arrays is:", result)

Output:

The CityBlock distance between 2 arrays is: 36

There is no restriction for the same size of arrays. So, it’s easy to calculate City Block distance between 2-coordinates using above formula but we can calculate the same using predefined method for arrays having 2-dimension or more. Code: Python code using the predefined method to calculate the distance using the above formula. Python3 1==

# Import necessary package
import scipy.spatial.distance as d

def CityBlock_distance(A, B):

    result = d.cdist(A, B, 'cityblock')
    return result

if __name__== "__main__":

    mat1 = [[1, 2, 13, 5], [2, 3, 4, 5]]
    mat2 = [[1, 27, 3, 4], [8, 6, 9, 3]]

    result = CityBlock_distance(mat1, mat2)

    print(result)

Output:

[[ 36.  17.]
 [ 27.  16.]]