String similarity score/hash

Question

Is there a method to calculate something like general \"similarity score\" of a string? In a way that I am not comparing two strings together but rather I get some number (h

Answer 1

Maybe use PCA, where the matrix is a list of the differences between the string and a fixed alphabet (à la ABCDEFGHI...). The answer could be simply the length of the principal component.

Just an idea.

ready-to-run PCA in C#