{"paper":{"title":"How the Avengers assemble: Ecological modelling of effective cast sizes for movies","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["physics.soc-ph"],"primary_cat":"cs.SI","authors_text":"Lewis Mitchell, Matthew Roughan, Tobin South","submitted_at":"2019-06-20T01:03:53Z","abstract_excerpt":"The number of characters in a movie is an interesting feature. However, it is non-trivial to measure directly. Naive metrics such as the number of credited characters vary wildly. Here, we show that a metric based on the notion of \"ecological diversity\" as expressed through a Shannon-entropy based metric can characterise the number of characters in a movie, and is useful in taxonomic classification. We also show how the metric can be generalised using Jensen-Shannon divergence to provide a measure of the similarity of characters appearing in different movies, for instance of use in recommender"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"1906.08403","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}