Working with Text-Based Distances
Nearest neighbors is more versatile than just dealing with numbers. As long as we have a way to measure distances between features, we can apply the nearest neighbors algorithm. In this recipe, we will introduce how to measure text distances with TensorFlow.
Getting ready
In this recipe, we will illustrate how to use TensorFlow's text distance metric, the Levenshtein distance (the edit distance), between strings. This will be important later in this chapter as we expand the nearest neighbor methods to include features with text.
The Levenshtein distance is the minimal number of edits to get from one string to another string. The allowed edits are inserting a character, deleting a character, or substituting a character with a different one. For this recipe, we will use TensorFlow's Levenshtein distance function, edit_distance(). It is worthwhile to illustrate the use of this function because the usage of this function will be applicable to later chapters.
