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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 most widely known string metric is a rudimentary one called the Levenshtein distance (also known as edit distance). [2] 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.
The difference between the two algorithms consists in that the optimal string alignment algorithm computes the number of edit operations needed to make the strings equal under the condition that no substring is edited more than once, whereas the second one presents no such restriction. Take for example the edit distance between CA and ABC.
Computing E(m, j) is very similar to computing the edit distance between two strings. In fact, we can use the Levenshtein distance computing algorithm for E ( m , j ), the only difference being that we must initialize the first row with zeros, and save the path of computation, that is, whether we used E ( i − 1, j ), E( i , j − 1) or E ( i ...
In bioinformatics, it can be used to quantify the similarity of DNA sequences, which can be viewed as strings of the letters A, C, G and T. Different definitions of an edit distance use different sets of like operations. Levenshtein distance operations are the removal, insertion, or substitution of a character in the string.
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),
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 ...
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).