The consider() method in the distance measure (Tanimoto in ur scenario) is the one that does the cut-off. All of the similarity measures (almost all of them) have some implementation of consider() so as to cut-off the returned results.
Have a look at Sebastian's explanation in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT-803. ________________________________ From: Pat Ferrel <p...@occamsmachete.com> To: user@mahout.apache.org Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2012 7:29 PM Subject: RowSimilarity I tried an experiment running RowSimilarity with 16 docs of short quotations on a similar subject. It looks to me that using tanimoto the largest pair-wise distance allowed for the similar docs was 0.4. Though I asked for 10 similar docs I got 0 to 10. I see this same effect with larger data sets but haven't seen an obvious cut-off point I was expecting to be able to make the decision about cut-off distance myself. In other words I was expecting to always get 20 similar docs when I asked for 20. It is useful to see what docs are at larger distances. How is RowSimilarity deciding when to cut-off the returned docs?
