Sequence Covering Similarity for Symbolic Sequence Comparison

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 semimetric in O(n · logn) compares with the Levenshtein’s distance that is in O(n2). A final example presents its application to plagiarism detection.