Re: tsvector pg_stats seems quite a bit off.

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Jan Urbański <wulczer(at)wulczer(dot)org>
Cc: Jesper Krogh <jesper(at)krogh(dot)cc>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: tsvector pg_stats seems quite a bit off.
Date: 2010-05-29 15:12:40
Message-ID: 19403.1275145960@sss.pgh.pa.us
Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email
Thread:
Lists: pgsql-hackers

=?UTF-8?B?SmFuIFVyYmHFhHNraQ==?= <wulczer(at)wulczer(dot)org> writes:
> Hm, I am now thinking that maybe this theory is flawed, because tsvecors
> contain only *unique* words, and Zipf's law is talking about words in
> documents in general. Normally a word like "the" would appear lots of
> times in a document, but (even ignoring the fact that it's a stopword
> and so won't appear at all) in a tsvector it will be present only once.
> This may or may not be a problem, not sure if such "squashing" of
> occurences as tsvectors do skewes the distribution away from Zipfian or not.

Well, it's still going to approach Zipfian distribution over a large
number of documents. In any case we are not really depending on Zipf's
law heavily with this approach. The worst-case result if it's wrong
is that we end up with an MCE list shorter than our original target.
I suggest we could try this and see if we notice that happening a lot.

regards, tom lane

In response to

Browse pgsql-hackers by date

  From Date Subject
Next Message Jan Urbański 2010-05-29 15:16:35 Re: tsvector pg_stats seems quite a bit off.
Previous Message Tom Lane 2010-05-29 15:09:13 Re: tsvector pg_stats seems quite a bit off.