ABC-SG: A New Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm-Based Distance of Sequential Data Using Sigma Grams

The problem of similarity search is one of the main problems in computer science. This problem has many applications in text-retrieval, web search, computational biology, bioinformatics and others. Similarity between two data objects can be depicted using a similarity measure or a distance metric. There are numerous distance metrics in the literature, some are used for a particular data type, and others are more general. In this paper we present a new distance metric for sequential data which is based on the sum of n-grams. The novelty of our distance is that these n-grams are weighted using artificial bee colony; a recent optimization algorithm based on the collective intelligence of a swarm of bees on their search for nectar. This algorithm has been used in optimizing a large number of numerical problems. We validate the new distance experimentally.