What is a Levenshtein Distance?
An edit distance metric that calculates the fewest delete, insert, and substitute operations required to change one word to another.
Levenshtein Distance explained in plain English
An edit distance metric that calculates the fewest delete, insert, and substitute operations required to change one word to another. For example, the Levenshtein distance between the words "heart" and "darts" is three because the following three edits are the fewest changes to turn one word into the other: 1. heart → deart (substitute "h" with "d") 2. deart → dart (delete "e") 3. dart → darts (insert "s") Note that the preceding sequence isn't the only path of three edits.
Example
Practitioners refer to levenshtein distance when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.
People also read
- A/B testing
A statistical way of comparing two (or more) techniques—the A and the B.
- ablation
A technique for evaluating the importance of a feature or component by temporarily removing it from a model.
- accuracy
The number of correct classification predictions divided by the total number of predictions.
- activation function
A function that enables neural networks to learn nonlinear (complex) relationships between features and the label.
- active learning
A training approach in which the algorithm chooses some of the data it learns from.
- adaptation
Synonym for tuning or fine-tuning.
- agglomerative clustering
See hierarchical clustering.
- anomaly detection
The process of identifying outliers.
- area under the PR curve
See PR AUC (Area under the PR Curve).
- area under the ROC curve
See AUC (Area under the ROC curve).