How do I get the probability of a string being similar to another string in Python?

I want to get a decimal value like 0.9 (meaning 90%) etc. Preferably with standard Python and library.

e.g.

similar("Apple","Appel") #would have a high prob.

similar("Apple","Mango") #would have a lower prob.

There is a built in.

from difflib import SequenceMatcher

def similar(a, b):
    return SequenceMatcher(None, a, b).ratio()

Using it:

>>> similar("Apple","Appel")
0.8
>>> similar("Apple","Mango")
0.0

I think maybe you are looking for an algorithm describing the distance between strings. Here are some you may refer to:

1. Hamming distance
2. Levenshtein distance
3. Damerau–Levenshtein distance
4. Jaro–Winkler distance

Solution #1: Python builtin

use SequenceMatcher from difflib

pros: native python library, no need extra package.
cons: too limited, there are so many other good algorithms for string similarity out there.

>>> from difflib import SequenceMatcher
>>> s = SequenceMatcher(None, "abcd", "bcde")
>>> s.ratio()
0.75

Solution #2: jellyfish library

its a very good library with good coverage and few issues. it supports:
– Levenshtein Distance
– Damerau-Levenshtein Distance
– Jaro Distance
– Jaro-Winkler Distance
– Match Rating Approach Comparison
– Hamming Distance

pros: easy to use, gamut of supported algorithms, tested.
cons: not native library.

example:

>>> import jellyfish
>>> jellyfish.levenshtein_distance(u'jellyfish', u'smellyfish')
2
>>> jellyfish.jaro_distance(u'jellyfish', u'smellyfish')
0.89629629629629637
>>> jellyfish.damerau_levenshtein_distance(u'jellyfish', u'jellyfihs')
1

Fuzzy Wuzzy is a package that implements Levenshtein distance in python, with some helper functions to help in certain situations where you may want two distinct strings to be considered identical. For example:

>>> fuzz.ratio("fuzzy wuzzy was a bear", "wuzzy fuzzy was a bear")
    91
>>> fuzz.token_sort_ratio("fuzzy wuzzy was a bear", "wuzzy fuzzy was a bear")
    100

You can create a function like:

def similar(w1, w2):
    w1 = w1 + ' ' * (len(w2) - len(w1))
    w2 = w2 + ' ' * (len(w1) - len(w2))
    return sum(1 if i == j else 0 for i, j in zip(w1, w2)) / float(len(w1))

Package distance includes Levenshtein distance:

import distance
distance.levenshtein("lenvestein", "levenshtein")
# 3

The builtin SequenceMatcher is very slow on large input, here’s how it can be done with diff-match-patch:

from diff_match_patch import diff_match_patch

def compute_similarity_and_diff(text1, text2):
    dmp = diff_match_patch()
    dmp.Diff_Timeout = 0.0
    diff = dmp.diff_main(text1, text2, False)

    # similarity
    common_text = sum([len(txt) for op, txt in diff if op == 0])
    text_length = max(len(text1), len(text2))
    sim = common_text / text_length

    return sim, diff

Note, difflib.SequenceMatcher only finds the longest contiguous matching subsequence, this is often not what is desired, for example:

>>> a1 = "Apple"
>>> a2 = "Appel"
>>> a1 *= 50
>>> a2 *= 50
>>> SequenceMatcher(None, a1, a2).ratio()
0.012  # very low
>>> SequenceMatcher(None, a1, a2).get_matching_blocks()
[Match(a=0, b=0, size=3), Match(a=250, b=250, size=0)]  # only the first block is recorded

Finding the similarity between two strings is closely related to the concept of pairwise sequence alignment in bioinformatics. There are many dedicated libraries for this including biopython. This example implements the Needleman Wunsch algorithm:

>>> from Bio.Align import PairwiseAligner
>>> aligner = PairwiseAligner()
>>> aligner.score(a1, a2)
200.0
>>> aligner.algorithm
'Needleman-Wunsch'

Using biopython or another bioinformatics package is more flexible than any part of the python standard library since many different scoring schemes and algorithms are available. Also, you can actually get the matching sequences to visualise what is happening:

>>> alignment = next(aligner.align(a1, a2))
>>> alignment.score
200.0
>>> print(alignment)
Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple-
|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-|||-|-
App-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-elApp-el

You can find most of the text similarity methods and how they are calculated under this link: https://github.com/luozhouyang/python-string-similarity#python-string-similarity Here some examples;

• Normalized, metric, similarity and distance

• (Normalized) similarity and distance

• Metric distances

• Shingles (n-gram) based similarity and distance
• Levenshtein
• Normalized Levenshtein
• Weighted Levenshtein
• Damerau-Levenshtein
• Optimal String Alignment
• Jaro-Winkler
• Longest Common Subsequence
• Metric Longest Common Subsequence
• N-Gram
• Shingle(n-gram) based algorithms
• Q-Gram
• Cosine similarity
• Jaccard index
• Sorensen-Dice coefficient
• Overlap coefficient (i.e.,Szymkiewicz-Simpson)