Damerau-Levenshtein Distance With Adjacent Transpositions

Damerau-Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. It is a variant of the Levenshtein distance algorithm, which calculates the minimum number of operations required to transform one string into another. The Damerau-Levenshtein distance algorithm also allows for the use of adjacent transpositions, which is a way of transforming one string into another by swapping the positions of two adjacent characters. This means that the algorithm can take into account the fact that transposing two adjacent characters may be a more efficient way of transforming one string into another compared to other operations like insertion, deletion, or substitution.

At Tilores we use the Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm as one of the potential data record matching algorithms for entity resolution. These can be combined with other matching algorithms to allow fine-tuned data matching and deduplication.