Hamming Similarity

The Hamming distance between two vectors represents the number of dimensions where they differ.

For example, when using binary vectors, the Hamming distance between two vectors is the number of bits you must change to change one vector into the other. To compute the Hamming distance between two vectors, you need to compare the position of each bit in the sequence. You can do this by using exclusive or (also called the XOR bit operation), which outputs 1 if the bits in the sequence do not match, and 0 otherwise. It's important to note that the bit strings need to be of equal length for the comparison to make sense.

The Hamming metric is mainly used with binary vectors for error detection over networks.

Description of the illustration hamming_similarity2.png