research-article

Efficient Computation of the Tree Edit Distance

Authors:

Mateusz Pawlik,

Nikolaus AugstenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Volume 40, Issue 1

Article No.: 3, Pages 1 - 40

https://doi.org/10.1145/2699485

Published: 25 March 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We consider the classical tree edit distance between ordered labelled trees, which is defined as the minimum-cost sequence of node edit operations that transform one tree into another. The state-of-the-art solutions for the tree edit distance are not satisfactory. The main competitors in the field either have optimal worst-case complexity but the worst case happens frequently, or they are very efficient for some tree shapes but degenerate for others. This leads to unpredictable and often infeasible runtimes. There is no obvious way to choose between the algorithms.

In this article we present RTED, a robust tree edit distance algorithm. The asymptotic complexity of our algorithm is smaller than or equal to the complexity of the best competitors for any input instance, that is, our algorithm is both efficient and worst-case optimal. This is achieved by computing a dynamic decomposition strategy that depends on the input trees. RTED is shown optimal among all algorithms that use LRH (left-right-heavy) strategies, which include RTED and the fastest tree edit distance algorithms presented in literature. In our experiments on synthetic and real-world data we empirically evaluate our solution and compare it to the state-of-the-art.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems

ACM Transactions on Database Systems Volume 40, Issue 1

March 2015

260 pages

ISSN:0362-5915

EISSN:1557-4644

DOI:10.1145/2751312

Editor:
Christian S. Jensen
Aalborg University, Denmark

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 25 March 2015

Accepted: 01 September 2014

Revised: 01 May 2014

Received: 01 December 2013

Published in TODS Volume 40, Issue 1

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RARE project funded by the Autonomous Province of Bolzano-South Tyrol, Italy
SyRA project of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695269
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