Cosine similarity and tf-idf

Tf-idf is a transformation you apply to texts to get two real-valued vectors. You can then obtain the cosine similarity of any pair of vectors by taking their dot product and dividing that by the product of their norms. That yields the cosine of the angle between the vectors.

If d₂ and q are tf-idf vectors, then

where θ is the angle between the vectors. As θ ranges from 0 to 90 degrees, cos θ ranges from 1 to 0. θ can only range from 0 to 90 degrees, because tf-idf vectors are non-negative.

There’s no particularly deep connection between tf-idf and the cosine similarity/vector space model; tf-idf just works quite well with document-term matrices. It has uses outside of that domain, though, and in principle you could substitute another transformation in a VSM.

(Formula taken from the Wikipedia, hence the d₂.)