Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 1,062

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Similarity Metric

Li, M., Chen, X., Li, X., Ma, B., Vitanyi, P.M.B.·2004·IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Abstract

A new class of distances appropriate for measuring similarity relations between sequences, say one type of similarity per distance, is studied. We propose a new "normalized information distance," based on the noncomputable notion of Kolmogorov complexity, and show that it is in this class and it minorizes every computable distance in the class (that is, it is universal in that it discovers all computable similarities). We demonstrate that it is a metric and call it the similarity metric . This theory forms the foundation for a new practical tool. To evidence generality and robustness, we give two distinctive applications in widely divergent areas using standard compression programs like gzip and GenCompress. First, we compare whole mitochondrial genomes and infer their evolutionary history. This results in a first completely automatic computed whole mitochondrial phylogeny tree. Secondly, we fully automatically compute the language tree of 52 different languages.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/tit.2004.838101

Cites

1 of 1 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 1 references

Cited by

See all 1,062

Metadata

Authors
Li, M., Chen, X., Li, X., Ma, B., & Vitanyi, P. M. B.
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Published
2004-12
Volume
50
Issue
12
Pages
3250-3264
ISSN
0018-9448 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2144221002
Cited by
1,062
References
1
FWCI
36.05
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Similarity Metric. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/tit.2004.838101
The paper
Li, M., Chen, X., Li, X., Ma, B., & Vitanyi, P. M. B. (2004). The Similarity Metric. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. https://doi.org/10.1109/tit.2004.838101

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.