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TIBCO® Patterns 6.1.2

# The Meaning of a Match Score

The match score returned by TIBCO Patterns, always a value between 0.0 and 1.0, is a confidence measure based on the overall similarity between a simple or complex query and one or more fields of a given record. The score value is influenced by several factors such as patterns of similar characters, the similarity of token structure, thesaurus equivalences, specially weighted terms, and so on. TIBCO Patterns makes effective use of most of this score range: a record scoring 0.3, or even 0.2, might have a significant likelihood of being a record of interest, depending on the context of your application.

This point reiterates the point that was made in the Introduction. In the world of inexact matching, the answer to the question “Does it match?” is not always a clear “yes” or “no”, but often a “maybe.” Put another way, the value of inexact matching resides precisely in that range of scores that are neither “poor” nor “perfect.”

Of course, the match score cannot and does not take everything into account, like the nature of your application, your business context, or your business rules. This is why TIBCO Patterns always returns a requested number of matches, rather than arbitrarily cutting off the list at a particular score threshold. You are the best judge of how the confidence measure represented by the match score relates to your business and application context.

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