The Jaccard index, also known as the Jaccard similarity coefficent, is a statistic used for comparing the similarity and diversity of sample sets.
The Jaccard coefficient is defined as the size of the intersection divided by the size of the union of the sample sets: .
A related term that bears mentioning is the Jaccard distance, which measures dissimilarity between sample sets. The Jaccard distance is obtained by subtracting the size of intersection of the sets by the size of the union, and dividing the resulting quantity by the size of the union.
Given two objects, A and B, each with n binary attributes, the Jaccard coefficient is a useful measure of the overlap that A and B share with their attributes. Each attribute of A and B can either be 0 or 1. The total number of each combination of attributes for both A and B are specified as follows:
The Jaccard similarity coefficient, J, is given as
The Jaccard distance, J', is given as
Cosine similarity is a measure of similarity between two vectors of n dimensions by finding the angle between them, often used to compare documents in text mining. Given two vectors of attributes, A and B, the cosine similarity, , is represented using a dot product and magnitude as
Since the angle, , is in the range of , the resulting similarity will yield the value of as meaning exactly opposite, meaning independent, 0 meaning exactly the same, with in-between values indicating intermediate similarities or dissimilarities.
This cosine similarity metric may be extended such that it yields the Jaccard Coefficient in the case of binary attributes. This is the Tanimoto Coefficient, , represented as
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