A tool for computing the association between two events, measures how much knowing that one event has occurred increases the likelihood of the other event. For example, in natural language processing, it can quantify the relationship between two words, revealing whether their co-occurrence is statistically significant or simply due to chance. A higher value indicates a stronger association.
This measurement provides valuable insights across various fields. In text analysis, it helps identify collocations and improve machine translation. In bioinformatics, it can uncover relationships between genes or proteins. Its development stemmed from the need to quantify dependencies beyond simple correlation, offering a more nuanced understanding of probabilistic relationships. This metric has become increasingly relevant with the rise of big data and the need to extract meaningful information from large datasets.
