Median strings

The concept of 'median string' over a set of strings is introduced in this paper. The set median is defined to be that element in the set of strings which has the smallest sum of distances (with respect to an arbitrary measure) from the other elements, and the (generalized) median is a hypothetical, artificially constructed element which has the smallest sum of distances from all the elements of the given set. The applicability of the median strings in the recognition of garbled strings is demonstrated, where they mostly yield a higher accuracy than the multiple-similarity and the k-nearest-neighbour methods.