St. Cloud State University theRepository at St. Cloud State Culminating Projects in Applied Statistics Department of Mathematics and Statistics 12-2013 Optimal Matching Distances between Categorical Sequences: Distortion and Inferences by Permutation Juan P. Zuluaga Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stat_etds Part of the Applied Statistics Commons Recommended Citation Zuluaga, Juan P., "Optimal Matching Distances between Categorical Sequences: Distortion and Inferences by Permutation" (2013). Culminating Projects in Applied Statistics. 8. https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stat_etds/8 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at theRepository at St. Cloud State. It has been accepted for inclusion in Culminating Projects in Applied Statistics by an authorized administrator of theRepository at St. Cloud State. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. OPTIMAL MATCHING DISTANCES BETWEEN CATEGORICAL SEQUENCES: DISTORTION AND INFERENCES BY PERMUTATION by Juan P. Zuluaga B.A. Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, 1995 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of St. Cloud State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science St. Cloud, Minnesota December, 2013 This thesis submitted by Juan P. Zuluaga in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science at St. Cloud State University is hereby approved by the final evaluation committee. Chairperson Dean School of Graduate Studies OPTIMAL MATCHING DISTANCES BETWEEN CATEGORICAL SEQUENCES: DISTORTION AND INFERENCES BY PERMUTATION Juan P. Zuluaga Sequence data (an ordered set of categorical states) is a very common type of data in Social Sciences, Genetics and Computational Linguistics.