How to calculate distance similarity measure of given 2 strings?

Question

I need to calculate the similarity between 2 strings. So what exactly do I mean? Let me explain with an example:

• The real word: hospital
• Mistaken word: haspita

Now my aim is to determine how many characters I need to modify the mistaken word to obtain the real word. In this example, I need to modify 2 letters. So what would be the percent? I take the length of the real word always. So it becomes 2 / 8 = 25% so these 2 given string DSM is 75%.

How can I achieve this with performance being a key consideration?

Answer 1

I just addressed this exact same issue a few weeks ago. Since someone is asking now, I'll share the code. In my exhaustive tests my code is about 10x faster than the C# example on Wikipedia even when no maximum distance is supplied. When a maximum distance is supplied, this performance gain increases to 30x - 100x +. Note a couple key points for performance:

• If you need to compare the same words over and over, first convert the words to arrays of integers. The Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm includes many >, <, == comparisons, and ints compare much faster than chars.
• It includes a short-circuiting mechanism to quit if the distance exceeds a provided maximum
• Use a rotating set of three arrays rather than a massive matrix as in all the implementations I've see elsewhere
• Make sure your arrays slice accross the shorter word width.

Code (it works the exact same if you replace int[] with String in the parameter declarations:

/// <summary>
/// Computes the Damerau-Levenshtein Distance between two strings, represented as arrays of
/// integers, where each integer represents the code point of a character in the source string.
/// Includes an optional threshhold which can be used to indicate the maximum allowable distance.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="source">An array of the code points of the first string</param>
/// <param name="target">An array of the code points of the second string</param>
/// <param name="threshold">Maximum allowable distance</param>
/// <returns>Int.MaxValue if threshhold exceeded; otherwise the Damerau-Leveshteim distance between the strings</returns>
public static int DamerauLevenshteinDistance(int[] source, int[] target, int threshold) {

    int length1 = source.Length;
    int length2 = target.Length;

    // Return trivial case - difference in string lengths exceeds threshhold
    if (Math.Abs(length1 - length2) > threshold) { return int.MaxValue; }

    // Ensure arrays [i] / length1 use shorter length 
    if (length1 > length2) {
        Swap(ref target, ref source);
        Swap(ref length1, ref length2);
    }

    int maxi = length1;
    int maxj = length2;

    int[] dCurrent = new int[maxi + 1];
    int[] dMinus1 = new int[maxi + 1];
    int[] dMinus2 = new int[maxi + 1];
    int[] dSwap;

    for (int i = 0; i <= maxi; i++) { dCurrent[i] = i; }

    int jm1 = 0, im1 = 0, im2 = -1;

    for (int j = 1; j <= maxj; j++) {

        // Rotate
        dSwap = dMinus2;
        dMinus2 = dMinus1;
        dMinus1 = dCurrent;
        dCurrent = dSwap;

        // Initialize
        int minDistance = int.MaxValue;
        dCurrent[0] = j;
        im1 = 0;
        im2 = -1;

        for (int i = 1; i <= maxi; i++) {

            int cost = source[im1] == target[jm1] ? 0 : 1;

            int del = dCurrent[im1] + 1;
            int ins = dMinus1[i] + 1;
            int sub = dMinus1[im1] + cost;

            //Fastest execution for min value of 3 integers
            int min = (del > ins) ? (ins > sub ? sub : ins) : (del > sub ? sub : del);

            if (i > 1 && j > 1 && source[im2] == target[jm1] && source[im1] == target[j - 2])
                min = Math.Min(min, dMinus2[im2] + cost);

            dCurrent[i] = min;
            if (min < minDistance) { minDistance = min; }
            im1++;
            im2++;
        }
        jm1++;
        if (minDistance > threshold) { return int.MaxValue; }
    }

    int result = dCurrent[maxi];
    return (result > threshold) ? int.MaxValue : result;
}

Where Swap is:

static void Swap<T>(ref T arg1,ref T arg2) {
    T temp = arg1;
    arg1 = arg2;
    arg2 = temp;
}