Levenshtein Edit Distances
Levenshtein Edit Distances
This tool calculates the Levenshtein Edit Distance (LED) between two sequences.
Instructions
- This tool computes the Levenshtein Edit Distance (LED) between any two sequences.
- A LED is the number of edits needed to convert a sequence A into a sequence B (Garcia, 2015a).
- Edits are insertions, deletions, or substitutions with an operational cost usually set to 1.
- The tool also converts a LED into a similarity score ("Levenshtein Similarity") (Garcia, 2015b; Lin, 1998).
- A and B can be words, phrases, sentences,... or combinations of these.
Who can use it?
- Anyone working on sequencing analysis, text mining, or that need to compare strings, keywords, etc.
Suggested Exercises
- Make the following transformations:
- republicans => democrats
- democrats => independents
- independents => republicans
- trumpet => trump => tramp
- obama nation => abomination
- Use the output from previous exercise to prove that the Levenshtein Distance is a metric.
- Sort a table of chemical formulas similar to H3PO4 in terms of their Levenshtein Distances.
Recommended Readings