Visually interactive identification of a cohort of similar data objects is disclosed. One example is a system including a data processor to access a plurality of data objects, each data object comprising a plurality of numerical components, where each component represents a data feature of a plurality of data features, and to identify, for each data feature, a feature distribution of the numerical components. A selector selects a sub-plurality of the data features of a query object, where a given data feature is selected if the component representing the given data feature is a peak for the feature distribution. An evaluator determines a similarity measure based on the sub-plurality of the data features. An interaction processor iteratively processes selection of a sub-plurality of the data features based on domain knowledge, and identifies, based on the similarity measures, a cohort of data objects similar to the query object.