Category utility (original) (raw)

Category utility is a measure of "category goodness" defined in and . It attempts to maximize both the probability that two objects in the same category have attribute values in common, and the probability that objects from different categories have different attribute values. It was intended to supersede more limited measures of category goodness such as "cue validity" and "collocation index". It provides a normative information-theoretic measure of the predictive advantage gained by the observer who possesses knowledge of the given category structure (i.e., the class labels of instances) over the observer who does not possess knowledge of the category structure. In this sense the motivation for the category utility measure is similar to the information gain metric used in decisi