Editing Levenshtein distance (section)

==Relationship with other edit distance metrics==
{{main|Edit distance}}
There are other popular measures of [[edit distance]], which are calculated using a different set of allowable edit operations. For instance,
* the [[Damerau–Levenshtein distance]] allows the [[Transposition (mathematics)|transposition]] of two adjacent characters alongside insertion, deletion, substitution;
* the [[longest common subsequence problem|longest common subsequence]] (LCS) distance allows only insertion and deletion, not substitution;
* the [[Hamming distance]] allows only substitution, hence, it only applies to strings of the same length.
* the [[Jaro distance]] allows only [[Transposition (mathematics)|transposition]].

[[Edit distance]] is usually defined as a parameterizable metric calculated with a specific set of allowed edit operations, and each operation is assigned a cost (possibly infinite). This is further generalized by DNA [[sequence alignment]] algorithms such as the [[Smith–Waterman algorithm]], which make an operation's cost depend on where it is applied.