Sequence Covering Similarity for Symbolic Sequence Comparison

Pierre-François Marteau (1)

1 EXPRESSION - Expressiveness in Human Centered Data/Media

This paper introduces the sequence covering similarity, that we formally define for evaluating the similarity between a symbolic sequence (string) and a set of symbolic sequences (strings). From this covering similarity we derive a pair-wise distance to compare two symbolic sequences. We show that this covering distance is a semimetric. Few examples are given to show how this string metric in $O(n \cdot log n)$ compares with the Levenshtein's distance that is in $O(n^2)$. A final example presents its application to plagiarism detection.

Mots clés: Symbolic Sequence Match- ing; Sequence Covering; Sequence Covering Similarity; String Matching; Index terms— Sequence Covering Similarity; Sequence Mining; Similarity; Symbolic Sequence Matching

Domaines: Recherche d'information [cs.IR]

Pierre-François Marteau. Sequence Covering Similarity for Symbolic Sequence Comparison. 2018. ⟨hal-01689286v3⟩