Re: VMs: excessive frequency of doubles...

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Marke,

At 09:22 18/08/2004 +0100, Marke Fincher wrote:
> In the figures below you can see that the actual number of doubled
> words is in many cases way beyond what you should expect if the
> words were created independently by a random process.

At 14:52 17/08/2004 +0100, Marke Fincher wrote:
> My example was for a specific word (w) with probability (1/p).
> So the probability of a double of that _particular_ word (w.w) is 1/(p*p).

Actually, I think your table of z-values might even be *understating* this 
issue. :-o

For a word that occurs n times in an s-long sample, the probability of any 
given word being that word is (n/s) - but the probability of the following 
word also being that same word is ((n-1)/(s-1)), because you've used up one 
of your n instances and one of your (s samples). Asymptotically, that's 
very close to (n/s) - but in your table, many of the instance counts are 
extremely low, which would surely alter many of the numbers quite a bit?

Just a thought! :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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