In information theory and computer science, the edit distance between two strings of characters generally refers to the Levenshtein distance. However, according to Nico Jacobs, “The term ‘edit distance’ is sometimes used to refer to the distance in which insertions and deletions have equal cost and replacements have twice the cost of an insertion”.
It may also refer to the whole class of string metrics that measure distance as the (weighted or unweighted) number of operations required to transform a string into another. There are several different ways to define an edit distance, depending on which edit operations are allowed: replace, delete, insert, transpose, and so on. There are algorithms to calculate its value under various definitions:
- Hamming distance
- Levenshtein distance (the most common definition, calculated by Hirschberg's algorithm or the Wagner–Fischer algorithm)
- Damerau–Levenshtein distance
- Jaro–Winkler distance
Famous quotes containing the words edit and/or distance:
“To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit it and read it are old women over their tea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)