Lightweight, super fast library for sequence alignment using edit (Levenshtein) distance.
Popular use cases: aligning DNA sequences, calculating word/text similarity.
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Edlib is actually a C/C++ library, and this package is it's wrapper for Python. Python Edlib has mostly the same API as C/C++ Edlib, so feel free to check out C/C++ Edlib docs for more code examples, details on API and how Edlib works.
- Calculates edit distance.
- It can find optimal alignment path (instructions how to transform first sequence into the second sequence).
- It can find just the start and/or end locations of alignment path - can be useful when speed is more important than having exact alignment path.
- Supports multiple alignment methods: global(NW), prefix(SHW) and infix(HW), each of them useful for different scenarios.
- You can extend character equality definition, enabling you to e.g. have wildcard characters, to have case insensitive alignment or to work with degenerate nucleotides.
- It can easily handle small or very large sequences, even when finding alignment path.
- Super fast thanks to Myers's bit-vector algorithm.
NOTE: Alphabet length has to be <= 256 (meaning that query and target together must have <= 256 unique values).
pip install edlib
Edlib has two functions, align()
and getNiceAlignment()
:
align(query, target, [mode], [task], [k], [additionalEqualities])
Aligns query
against target
with edit distance.
query
and target
can be strings, bytes, or any iterables of hashable objects, as long as all together they don't have more than 256 unique values.
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getNiceAlignment(alignResult, query, target)
Represents alignment from align()
in a visually attractive format.
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I run a simple benchmark on 7 Feb 2017 (using timeit, on Python3) to get a feeling of how Edlib compares to other Python libraries: editdistance and python-Levenshtein.
As input data I used pairs of DNA sequences of different lengths, where each pair has about 90% similarity.
#1: query length: 30, target length: 30 edlib.align(query, target): 1.88µs editdistance.eval(query, target): 1.26µs Levenshtein.distance(query, target): 0.43µs #2: query length: 100, target length: 100 edlib.align(query, target): 3.64µs editdistance.eval(query, target): 3.86µs Levenshtein.distance(query, target): 14.1µs #3: query length: 1000, target length: 1000 edlib.align(query, target): 0.047ms editdistance.eval(query, target): 5.4ms Levenshtein.distance(query, target): 1.9ms #4: query length: 10000, target length: 10000 edlib.align(query, target): 0.0021s editdistance.eval(query, target): 0.56s Levenshtein.distance(query, target): 0.2s #5: query length: 50000, target length: 50000 edlib.align(query, target): 0.031s editdistance.eval(query, target): 13.8s Levenshtein.distance(query, target): 5.0s
Check out C/C++ Edlib docs for more information about Edlib!
Check out Edlib python package on Github.