Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Williams, Christopher K. I.

Titel

On Suspicious Coincidences and Pointwise Mutual Information

Ist Teil von

• Neural computation, 2022-09, Vol.34 (10), p.2037-2046

Ort / Verlag

One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209, USA: MIT Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection (EBSCO)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Barlow (1985) hypothesized that the co-occurrence of two events and is “suspicious” if . We first review classical measures of association for 2 2 contingency tables, including Yule's (Yule, ), which depends only on the odds ratio and is independent of the marginal probabilities of the table. We then discuss the mutual information (MI) and pointwise mutual information (PMI), which depend on the ratio , as measures of association. We show that once the effect of the marginals is removed, MI and PMI behave similarly to as functions of . The pointwise mutual information is used extensively in some research communities for flagging suspicious coincidences. We discuss the pros and cons of using it in this way, bearing in mind the sensitivity of the PMI to the marginals, with increased scores for sparser events.