A metric dissimilarity must satisfy nonnegativity, separation, symmetry and the triangle inequality:
The underlying objects must be specified: here they are binary measurement profiles, rather than labels attached to individuals.
Let count coordinate pairs of the indicated types. The simple matching coefficient is , so its complementary dissimilarity is . Counting mismatches in every pair gives the dissimilarity matrix
For the Jaccard coefficient, joint absences are excluded: . Thus the Jaccard distance is , giving
Only the pair of individuals two and four has a joint absence. Their profiles have one shared presence, two mismatched presences and one joint absence, giving dissimilarities and , respectively. All other pairs have a presence in at least one profile at every coordinate, so the two denominators coincide.
For the requested metric property of simple matching dissimilarity, write a general pair of -coordinate binary profiles as . Then
which is the normalized Hamming distance. It is nonnegative and symmetric, and equals zero exactly when all coordinates match. For each coordinate, a mismatch between and forces a mismatch between or between . Therefore
Summing and dividing by proves the triangle inequality, establishing all four metric properties. Simple matching dissimilarity is a metric on binary profiles. If two separately labelled individuals have identical profiles, it gives zero distance between them, so on those labels it is only a pseudometric. The four profiles here are distinct, so this distinction does not prevent from defining a metric on the given sample.