Step 3: Sequence Alignment

Now that we have a sequential representation of our data, we can apply sequence alignment algorithms. Such algorithms compute the distance between two sequences as the effort that is necessary to turn the first input sequence into the second by simple transformation operations, namely:

Another intuitive explanation of alignment algorithms is that they try to extend both input sequences with gaps (-) such that the most similar nodes of both sequences are aligned.

The simplest alignment algorithm is the classic string edit distance. On the right hand side we have set up an interface to feed in simple character sequences into the TCS Alignment Toolbox and to compute the alignment between them.