# Using Full-Text Content to Characterize and Identify Best Seller Books

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02334/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of doc2vec with Practical Insights into Document Embedding Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.05368/) (2016)
- [Quantifying Long-Term Scientific Impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.3293/) (2013)
- [Clustering Algorithms: A Comparative Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08388/) (2016)
- [SemAxis: A Lightweight Framework to Characterize Domain-Specific Word Semantics Beyond Sentiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05521/) (2018)
- [Linear and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis: Tutorial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02590/) (2019)
- [Principal Component Analysis: A Natural Approach to Data Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02502/) (2018)
- [A systematic comparison of supervised classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.0202/) (2013)
- [On predicting research grants productivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10700/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artistic pieces can be studied from several perspectives, one example being their reception among readers over time. In the present work, we approach this interesting topic from the standpoint of literary works, particularly assessing the task of predicting whether a book will become a best seller. Dissimilarly from previous approaches, we focused on the full content of books and considered visualization and classification tasks. We employed visualization for the preliminary exploration of the data structure and properties, involving SemAxis and linear discriminant analyses. Then, to obtain quantitative and more objective results, we employed various classifiers. Such approaches were used along with a dataset containing (i) books published from 1895 to 1924 and consecrated as best sellers by the Publishers Weekly Bestseller Lists and (ii) literary works published in the same period but not being mentioned in that list. Our comparison of methods revealed that the best-achieved result - combining a bag-of-words representation with a logistic regression classifier - led to an average accuracy of 0.75 both for the leave-one-out and 10-fold cross-validations. Such an outcome suggests that it is unfeasible to predict the success of books with high accuracy using only the full content of the texts. Nevertheless, our findings provide insights into the factors leading to the relative success of a literary work.