A Bioinformatics-Inspired Adaptation to Ukkonen’s Edit Distance Calculating Algorithm and Its Applicability Towards Distributed Data Mining

Abstract

Edit distance measures the similarity between two strings (as the minimum number of change, insert or delete operations that transform one string to the other). An edit sequence s is a sequence of such operations and can be used to represent the string resulting from applying s to a reference string. We present a modification to Ukkonen’s edit distance calculating algorithm based upon representing strings by edit sequences. We conclude with a demonstration of how using this representation can improve mitochondrial DNA query throughput performance in a distributed computing environment.