Stylometry and mathematical study of authorship

Abstract

Inspired by various authorship attribution problems in the history of literature and the application of machine learning in the study of literary stylometry, we develop a rigorous new method for the mathematical analysis of authorship by testing for a so-called chrono-divide in writing styles. Our method incorporates some of the latest advances in the study of authorship attribution, particularly techniques from support vector machines. By introducing the notion of relative frequency as a feature ranking metric our method proves to be highly effective and robust. Applying our method to the Cheng-Gao version of Dream of the Red Chamber has led to convincing if not irrefutable evidence that the first 80 chapters and the last 40 chapters of the book were written by two different authors. Applying our method to the novel Micro, we are able to confirm the existence of the chrono-divide and identify its location so that we can differentiate the contribution of Michael Crichton and Richard Preston. We have also tested our method to the other three Great Classical Novels in Chinese. As expected no chrono-divides have been found. This provides further evidence of the robustness of our method.