String metric

In mathematics and computer science, a string metric (also known as a string similarity metric or string distance function) is a metric that measures distance ("inverse similarity") between two text strings for approximate string matching or comparison and in fuzzy string searching. A requirement for a string metric (e.g. in contrast to string matching) is fulfillment of the triangle inequality. For example, the strings "Sam" and "Samuel" can be considered to be close. A string metric provides a number indicating an algorithm-specific indication of distance.

The most widely known string metric is a rudimentary one called the Levenshtein distance (also known as edit distance). 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.

String metrics are used heavily in information integration and are currently used in areas including fraud detection, fingerprint analysis, plagiarism detection, ontology merging, DNA analysis, RNA analysis, image analysis, evidence-based machine learning, database data deduplication, data mining, incremental search, data integration, malware detection, and semantic knowledge integration.

List of string metrics

Levenshtein distance, or its generalization edit distance

Damerau–Levenshtein distance

Sørensen–Dice coefficient

Block distance or L1 distance or City block distance

Hamming distance

Simple matching coefficient (SMC)

Jaccard similarity or Jaccard coefficient or Tanimoto coefficient

Tversky index

Overlap coefficient

Variational distance

Hellinger distance or Bhattacharyya distance

Information radius (Jensen–Shannon divergence)

Skew divergence

Confusion probability

Tau metric, an approximation of the Kullback–Leibler divergence

Fellegi and Sunters metric (SFS)

Maximal matches

Grammar-based distance

TFIDF distance metric

There also exist functions which measure a dissimilarity between strings, but do not necessarily fulfill the triangle inequality, and as such are not metrics in the mathematical sense.