Edit Distance

The minimum edit distance between two strings is the minimum number of editing operations Insertion Deletion Substitution needed to transform one into other.

Defining Min Edit Distance

For two Strings:

• $X$ of length $n$
• $Y$ of length $m$

We define $D(i,j)$

• the edit distance between $X[1..i]$ and $Y[1..j]$, i.e. the first $i$ characters of $X$ and the first $j$ characters of $Y$.
• the edit distance between $X$ and $Y$ is thus $D(n,m)$.

Computing Min Edit Distance (Levenshtein)

• Initialization
  $D(i,0)=i$, $D(0,j)=j$

• Recurrence Relation:
  for each i=i…M
  for each j=1…N
  $D(i,j)= \begin{cases} D(i-1,j)+1 \\ D(i, j-1)+1 \\ D(i-1, j-1) + \begin{cases} 2 & \text{if $X(i) \neq Y(j)$}\\ 0 &\text{if $X(i) = Y(j)$} \end{cases} \end{cases}$

• Termination:
  $D(N,M)$ is the distance.