R Data Analysis Projects

String features

Let's look at the dedup function invocation once again:

> rec.pairs <- compare.dedup(RLdata500+                        ,blockfld = list(1, 5:7)+                        ,strcmp =   c(2,3,4)+                        ,strcmpfun = levenshteinSim).

The strcmp and strcmpfun parameters dictate on which fields we need to do string comparison and what kind of string comparison we need to apply. We pass a vector indicating the column IDs to strcmp. We need to do string comparisons in columns 2, 3, and 4. We want to use the Levenshtein distance to find the similarity between two strings.

Levenshtein distance (LD) is a measure of similarity between two strings, which we will refer to as the source string (s) and the target string (t). The distance is the number of deletions, insertions, or substitutions required ...