Statistical modelA statistical model is a mathematical model that embodies a set of statistical assumptions concerning the generation of sample data (and similar data from a larger population). A statistical model represents, often in considerably idealized form, the data-generating process. When referring specifically to probabilities, the corresponding term is probabilistic model. A statistical model is usually specified as a mathematical relationship between one or more random variables and other non-random variables.
Similarity measureIn statistics and related fields, a similarity measure or similarity function or similarity metric is a real-valued function that quantifies the similarity between two objects. Although no single definition of a similarity exists, usually such measures are in some sense the inverse of distance metrics: they take on large values for similar objects and either zero or a negative value for very dissimilar objects. Though, in more broad terms, a similarity function may also satisfy metric axioms.
Multinomial distributionIn probability theory, the multinomial distribution is a generalization of the binomial distribution. For example, it models the probability of counts for each side of a k-sided dice rolled n times. For n independent trials each of which leads to a success for exactly one of k categories, with each category having a given fixed success probability, the multinomial distribution gives the probability of any particular combination of numbers of successes for the various categories.
Fisher information metricIn information geometry, the Fisher information metric is a particular Riemannian metric which can be defined on a smooth statistical manifold, i.e., a smooth manifold whose points are probability measures defined on a common probability space. It can be used to calculate the informational difference between measurements. The metric is interesting in several respects. By Chentsov’s theorem, the Fisher information metric on statistical models is the only Riemannian metric (up to rescaling) that is invariant under sufficient statistics.
Additive smoothingIn statistics, additive smoothing, also called Laplace smoothing or Lidstone smoothing, is a technique used to smooth categorical data. Given a set of observation counts from a -dimensional multinomial distribution with trials, a "smoothed" version of the counts gives the estimator: where the smoothed count and the "pseudocount" α > 0 is a smoothing parameter. α = 0 corresponds to no smoothing. (This parameter is explained in below.
Tf–idfIn information retrieval, tf–idf (also TF*IDF, TFIDF, TF–IDF, or Tf–idf), short for term frequency–inverse document frequency, is a numerical statistic that is intended to reflect how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus. It is often used as a weighting factor in searches of information retrieval, text mining, and user modeling. The tf–idf value increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document and is offset by the number of documents in the corpus that contain the word, which helps to adjust for the fact that some words appear more frequently in general.
Semantic lexiconA semantic lexicon is a digital dictionary of words labeled with semantic classes so associations can be drawn between words that have not previously been encountered. Semantic lexicons are built upon semantic networks, which represent the semantic relations between words. The difference between a semantic lexicon and a semantic network is that a semantic lexicon has definitions for each word, or a "gloss". Semantic lexicons are made up of lexical entries. These entries are not orthographic, but semantic, eliminating issues of homonymy and polysemy.
Cache language modelA cache language model is a type of statistical language model. These occur in the natural language processing subfield of computer science and assign probabilities to given sequences of words by means of a probability distribution. Statistical language models are key components of speech recognition systems and of many machine translation systems: they tell such systems which possible output word sequences are probable and which are improbable.
Scoring algorithmScoring algorithm, also known as Fisher's scoring, is a form of Newton's method used in statistics to solve maximum likelihood equations numerically, named after Ronald Fisher. Let be random variables, independent and identically distributed with twice differentiable p.d.f. , and we wish to calculate the maximum likelihood estimator (M.L.E.) of . First, suppose we have a starting point for our algorithm , and consider a Taylor expansion of the score function, , about : where is the observed information matrix at .
