BIDistances (Q159738)

Provides a unified interface for computing, comparing, and examining distances, dissimilarities, divergences, and selected similarities for bioinformatics data. The core installation exposes 60 canonical named routes for numerical data and more than 90 when the suggested 'philentropy' backend is installed; aliases, user-defined functions, and mixed-data combinations are not included in these counts. Weighted Minkowski distances can be computed through 'parallelDist', an internal multicore implementation, or optional 'OpenCL' kernels, while the established weighted Euclidean GPU implementation is retained as the optimized p = 2 route. The package also supports theory-guided comparison of distance distributions for clustering, explicit mathematical property classifications, mixed-data constructions through 'manydist', and a specialized Gene Ontology-derived TF-IDF distance.