1. A method of utilizing a posterior-based feature with partial distance elimination for speech recognition, comprising: receiving, by a computer, an utterance comprising a plurality of speech frames; and evaluating, by the computer, a plurality of log likelihoods of Gaussians for a speech frame to calculate a partial distance by sequentially adding a plurality of dimensions, the partial distance elimination occurring when less than all of the plurality of dimensions are sequentially added; wherein the evaluating comprises maintaining a bound for the plurality of log likelihoods, the bound being determined by comparing the plurality of log likelihoods of Gaussians to a threshold value.