[Solved]: Find string that minimizes the sum of the edit distances to all other strings in set

Problem Detail: 

I have a set of strings $S$ and I am using the edit-distance (Levenshtein) to measure the distance between all pairs.

Is there an algorithm for finding the string $x$ which minimizes the sum of the distances to all strings in $S$, that is

$\arg_x \min \sum_{s \in S} \text{edit-distance}(x,s)$

It seems like there should, but I can't find the right reference.

Asked By : Jose M Vidal

Answered By : Vor

The problem is known as "median string problem" and it is NP-complete; some results can be found searching with Google; in particular "2-Approximation Algorithms for Median and Centre String Problems". If $x$ must be one of the points in $S$ then the problem becomes solvable in polynomial time.

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Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/2546

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