besides DNA matching

Sorry, but do you have any evidence or example of actual DNA problems being solved or assisted by running edit distance on subsequences?

Whilst computational biology is definitely not my field, I've seen no useful use of edit distance for genomic work-- beyond using it as a very crude first pass selection mechanism; but even for that it is almost useless as it selects on entirely the wrong criteria.

About as much use as comparing paintings, by weighing them.

As always, I'm more than happy to be proved wrong on this. (But neither opinion nor hearsay is proof!)

maybe typo correcting?

Run on pairs of individual words, it can be sometimes be vaguely useful, but given that 'lead' and 'gold' have a edit distance of 3 (or 75%) -- and then so do all these 2,382 other 4 character words:

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

-- so what does that mean? IMO it is an almost, if not entirely, useless metric.

And if you use it (any edit distance algorithm) on pairs of strings containing several words, the result *is* completely meaningless in any word-formation, language-structure, or typographical sense.

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

In reply to Re^5: Tips on how to perform this regex query by BrowserUk
in thread Tips on how to perform this regex query by Anonymous Monk

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