Shakespeare Statistics
The General Imposters Method and Wily Beguiled
in German
All data were generated with R Stylo.
See: 
In his blog "Authorship verification with the package 'stylo'" of May 30, 2018 Maciej Eder (https://computationalstylistics.github.io/blog/imposters/) described a new feature of the stylo package 'namely the General Imposters (GI) method, also referred to as the second verification system, introduced by Koppel and Winter (2014) and applied to the study of Julius Caesar's disputed writings (Kestemont et al., 2016a).' Eder then quotes the authors: "[t]he general intuition behind the GI, is not to assess whether two documents are simply similar in writing style, given a static feature vocabulary, but rather, it aims to assess whether two documents are significantly more similar to one another than other documents, across a variety of stochastically impaired feature spaces (Eder, 2012; Stamatatos, 2006), and compared to random selections of so-called distractor authors (Juola, 2015), also called 'imposters'." (Kestemont et al., 2016a: 88). In the context of the authorship attribution of the comedy Wily Beguiled (pr. 1606) the following play texts were in the corresponding folder:
anon_wilybeguiled.txt, dekker_fortunatus1599.txt, dekker_satiromastix1601.txt, greene_friarbb.txt, greene_orlando.txt, jonson_cynthia1600.txt, jonson_poetaster.txt, lyly_campaspe1583.txt, lyly_motherbombie.txt, mars_antoniorevenge.txt, marston_dcourtesan.txt, peele_arraignment.txt, peele_oldwives.txt, shak_12thnight1601.txt, shak_muchado.txt.
For each of these texts, word frequencies and the frequencies of word bigrams and character trigrams were examined with GI, where the number was determined with 2000 and the classical delta method was used in each case, supplemented by the so-called Wurzburg distance and Ruzicka metrics. The main procedure is available via the function imposters(). It assumes that all the texts to be analyzed are already pre-processed and represented in a form of a matrix with frequencies of features (usually words). The function contrasts, in several iterations, a text in question against (1) some texts written by possible candidates to authorship, or the authors that are suspected of being the actual author, and (2) a selection of "imposters", or the authors that could not have written the text to be assessed. Consequently, a given candidate's class is assigned a score between 0 and 1. On theoretical grounds, any score above 0.5 would suggest that the authorship verification for a given candidate was successful (quote from Eder's blog). The allocation resulted in the following tabular overview:
Table 1
Values above 0.5 prove authorship, though not necessarily sole authorship. By mistake the Marston prefixes were not identical, but the advantage of this flaw is that apparently The Dutch Courtezan became visible as being stylistically closer to Wily. It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that the Ruzicka metric, which takes an awfully long time to compute together with character trigrams (mf3c), is more accurate in evaluation, again referring to Lyly and Marston (compare rows, 4, 22 and 40) and the entries in columns B, K and T (anon).