How Does Levenshtein Distance Work?

The Levenshtein distance is a number that tells you how different two strings are. The higher the number, the more different the two strings are. For example, the Levenshtein distance between “kitten” and “sitting” is 3 since, at a minimum, 3 edits are required to change one into the other.

How is Levenshtein distance calculated?

The Levenshtein distance is usually calculated by preparing a matrix of size (M+1)x(N+1) —where M and N are the lengths of the 2 words—and looping through said matrix using 2 for loops, performing some calculations within each iteration.

What is edit distance with example?

For example if str1 = "ab", str2 = "abc" then making an insert operation of character 'c' on str1 transforms str1 into str2. Therefore, edit distance between str1 and str2 is 1. You can also calculate edit distance as number of operations required to transform str2 into str1.