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I have a bunch of names, and I want to obtain the unique names. However, due to spelling errors and inconsistencies in the data the names might be written down wrong. I am looking for a way to check in a vector of strings if two of them are similair.
For example:
pres <- c(" Obama, B.","Bush, G.W.","Obama, B.H.","Clinton, W.J.") I want to find that " Obama, B." and "Obama, B.H." are very similar. Is there a way to do this?
805
To calculate the similarity between two examples, you need to combine all the feature data for those two examples into a single numeric value. For instance, consider a shoe data set with only one feature: shoe size. You can quantify how similar two shoes are by calculating the difference between their sizes.
Typically, the Jaccard similarity coefficient (or index) is used to compare the similarity between two sets. For two sets, A and B , the Jaccard index is defined to be the ratio of the size of their intersection and the size of their union: J(A,B) = (A ∩ B) / (A ∪ B)
String similarity search is a fundamental query that has been widely used for DNA sequencing, error-tolerant query auto-completion, and data cleaning needed in database, data warehouse, and data mining.
This can be done based on eg the Levenshtein distance. There are multiple implementations of this in different packages. Some solutions and packages can be found in the answers of these questions:
But most often agrep will do what you want :
> sapply(pres,agrep,pres) $` Obama, B.` [1] 1 3 $`Bush, G.W.` [1] 2 $`Obama, B.H.` [1] 1 3 $`Clinton, W.J.` [1] 4 If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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