On 11/3/2016 1:49 PM, jlada...@itu.edu wrote:
The Levenshtein distance is a very precise definition of dissimilarity between
sequences. It specifies the minimum number of single-element edits you would
need to change one sequence into another. You are right that it is fairly
expensive to compute.
But you asked for an algorithm that would determine whether groups of strings are
"sort of similar". How imprecise can you be? An analysis of the frequency of
each individual character in a string might be good enough for you.
I also once used a Levenshtein distance algo in Python (code snippet
D0DE4716-B6E6-4161-9219-2903BF8F547F) to compare names of students (it
worked, but turned out to not be what I needed), but you may also be
able to use some items "off the shelf" from Python's difflib.
--
Neil Cerutti
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