Learning Data Mining with Python - Second Edition

Applications and use cases

Authorship analysis has a number of use cases. Many use cases are concerned with problems such as verifying authorship, proving shared authorship/provenance, or linking social media profiles with real-world users.

In a historical sense, we can use authorship analysis to verify whether certain documents were indeed written by their supposed authors. Controversial authorship claims include some of Shakespeare's plays, the Federalist papers from the USA's foundation period, and other historical texts.

Authorship studies alone cannot prove authorship but can provide evidence for or against a given theory, such as whether a particular person wrote a given document.

For example, we can analyze Shakespeare's plays to determine ...