Cosine Delta
Definition
A variant of Burrows's Delta that uses cosine similarity instead of Manhattan distance. Research by Smith and Aldridge (2011) and later Eder, Rybicki, and Kestemont has shown it often outperforms the original Delta on shorter texts and noisy corpora.
- Base method
- Variant of Burrows's Delta
- Distance measure
- Cosine similarity instead of Manhattan distance
- Key researchers
- Smith and Aldridge (2011); Eder, Rybicki, Kestemont
- Reported strength
- Often outperforms Delta on shorter, noisier texts
Common questions
Why would swapping the distance metric change performance on short texts?+
Cosine similarity measures the angle between frequency vectors rather than their absolute differences, which makes it less sensitive to overall text length and word-count noise that can distort Manhattan-distance comparisons on shorter samples.
Does Cosine Delta replace Burrows's Delta as the standard method in stylometry?+
No single variant has become universally standard; researchers commonly test several distance measures including Cosine Delta alongside classic Delta and report whichever performs best for the specific corpus and question at hand.
Related terms
- Burrows's Delta
- A distance metric introduced by John Burrows in 2002 that measures how far a text's standardised word-frequency profile deviates from the mean...
- Closed-Corpus Trap
- The error of validating a stylometric method exclusively on texts from authors whose profiles were used to build the model, inflating apparent...
- Cross-Validation
- A validation strategy that repeatedly partitions a labelled corpus into training and test subsets to estimate the method's error rate on unseen...
- Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
- A multivariate statistical method used in fire debris research to reduce chromatographic data matrices to principal components that capture major variance. Used...
- Rolling Delta
- Application of the Delta metric to a moving window of text, producing a curve showing how stylistic similarity to each candidate changes...