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It operates between two input strings, returning a number equivalent to the number of substitutions and deletions needed in order to transform one input string into another. Simplistic string metrics such as Levenshtein distance have expanded to include phonetic, token, grammatical and character-based methods of statistical comparisons.
The higher the Jaro–Winkler distance for two strings is, the less similar the strings are. The score is normalized such that 0 means an exact match and 1 means there is no similarity. The original paper actually defined the metric in terms of similarity, so the distance is defined as the inversion of that value (distance = 1 − similarity).
In statistics and related fields, a similarity measure or similarity function or similarity metric is a real-valued function that quantifies the similarity between two objects. Although no single definition of a similarity exists, usually such measures are in some sense the inverse of distance metrics : they take on large values for similar ...
When taken as a string similarity measure, the coefficient may be calculated for two strings, x and y using bigrams as follows: [11] = + where n t is the number of character bigrams found in both strings, n x is the number of bigrams in string x and n y is the number of bigrams in string y. For example, to calculate the similarity between:
In information theory, linguistics, and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. The Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other.
The similarity of two strings and is determined by this formula: twice the number of matching characters divided by the total number of characters of both strings. The matching characters are defined as some longest common substring [3] plus recursively the number of matching characters in the non-matching regions on both sides of the longest common substring: [2] [4]
Various algorithms exist that solve problems beside the computation of distance between a pair of strings, to solve related types of problems. Hirschberg's algorithm computes the optimal alignment of two strings, where optimality is defined as minimizing edit distance. Approximate string matching can be formulated in terms of edit distance.
For example, if two strings of length 1,000,000 differ by 1000 bits, then we consider that those strings are relatively more similar than two strings of 1000 bits that differ by 1000 bits. Hence we need to normalize to obtain a similarity metric. This way one obtains the normalized information distance (NID),