Frontiers of Computer Science in China

, Volume 5, Issue 1, pp 119–125 | Cite as

A metric normalization of tree edit distance

Research Article
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Accepted:

Abstract

Traditional normalized tree edit distances do not satisfy the triangle inequality. We present a metric normalization method for tree edit distance, which results in a new normalized tree edit distance fulfilling the triangle inequality, under the condition that the weight function is a metric over the set of elementary edit operations with all costs of insertions/deletions having the same weight. We prove that the new distance, in the range [0, 1], is a genuine metric as a simple function of the sizes of two ordered labeled trees and the tree edit distance between them, which can be directly computed through tree edit distance with the same complexity. Based on an efficient algorithm to represent digits as ordered labeled trees, we show that the normalized tree edit metric can provide slightly better results than other existing methods in handwritten digit recognition experiments using the approximating and eliminating search algorithm (AESA) algorithm.

Keywords

metric normalization tree edit distance triangle inequality approximating and eliminating search algorithm (AESA) 
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Copyright information

© Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.College of Computer Science and TechnologyBeijing University of TechnologyBeijingChina
  2. 2.College of Information Science and TechnologyHainan UniversityHaikouChina

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