Examining a Misapplication of Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification to Investigate Book of Mormon Authorship

Testing Authorship in the Personal Writings of Joseph Smith Using NSC Classification

In a co-authored paper (Jockers et al. 2008), my colleagues and I employed both delta and nearest shrunken centroid (NSC) classification in an authorship analysis of the Book of Mormon. Our results suggested that several men involved in the early formation of the Mormon Church might have been contributors to the Book of Mormon. For reasons detailed in that paper, and summarized again here, we e...

Stylometric Analyses of the Book of Mormon: A Short History

The abundance of skeptical theories about who wrote the Book of Mormon has led many scholars to seek scientific data to discover the answer. One technique is stylometry. Having first been developed in the 1850s, stylometry seeks to find the “wordprint” of a text. Although these stylistic studies are not as accurate as a human’s fingerprint, they can give researchers a good idea either of differ...

Nearest Shrunken Centroid as Feature Selection of Microarray Data

The nearest shrunken centroid classifier uses shrunken centroids as prototypes for each class and test samples are classified to belong to the class whose shrunken centroid is nearest to it. In our study, the nearest shrunken centroid classifier was used simply to select important genes prior to classification. Random Forest, a decision tree based classification algorithm, is chosen as a classi...

On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship

Improved centroids estimation for the nearest shrunken centroid classifier

MOTIVATION The nearest shrunken centroid (NSC) method has been successfully applied in many DNA-microarray classification problems. The NSC uses 'shrunken' centroids as prototypes for each class and identifies subsets of genes that best characterize each class. Classification is then made to the nearest (shrunken) centroid. The NSC is very easy to implement and very easy to interpret, however, ...