Jun 03, 2024python r distance-metrics

Distance Metrics

Life's a garden. Dig it.

Levenshtein distance¶

Given two strings A and B Levenshtein distance mesaures the minimum number of character replacements + insertions + deletions to transform A into B (or equivalently, B into A).

Example

$\operatorname {lev} (\text{"raccoon"}, \text{"baboon"}) = 3$

transformations

raccoon -> baccoon 
baccoon -> babcoon 
babcoon -> baboon

This example shows that "raccoon" can be transformed into "baboon" with three edits. It does not prove that three edits is the minimum necessary to get the job done.

For details on how Levenshtein distance is calculated, see the Wikipedia article.