A distance measure between sequences organized by spells

What is it about?

This article introduces a new distance measure between sequences. It acknowledges that sequences coding processes in the social sciences are typically organized by spells (i.e., a repetition of the same state for a whole episode). The resulting distance is based on the number of subsequences shared by two sequences and can take into account subsequence length, subsequence duration, and possible proximities between states.

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Why is it important?

By considering sequence of spells, this new distance measure is much more sensitive to the sequencing of the states. Furthermore, we also show using simulations and a practical example that optimal matching (OM) distance is not very sensitive to differences in the order of states. The new metric has been implemented in the freely available TraMineR package.