This happens to be a classic computational chemistry problem. When searching large chemical databases, compound characteristics are hashed into long bit strings to minimize the number of expensive graph comparisons. One common type of pairwise bitstring comparison is called a Tanimoto coefficient.
Tanimoto = (A & B) / (A | B)
Ie, the number of characteristics in common divided by the number of characteristics found in either. The bias is that positive information counts higher than negative. This is used to look for closest relatives, find a diverse subset and compare the diversity of collections (comparing the average of each object's closest relative within its collection).
I've probably gone too far with all this Comp Chem stuff but it might be a good way to compare many patents. Could also look for Cosine or Dice coefficients used in other fields.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|