A Linear Model for Three-Way Analysis of Facial Similarity

Card sorting was used to gather information about facial similarity judgments. A group of raters put a set of facial photos into an unrestricted number of different piles according to each rater’s judgment of similarity. This paper proposes a linear model for 3-way analysis of similarity. An overall rating function is a weighted linear combination of ratings from individual raters. A pair of photos is considered to be similar, dissimilar, or divided, respectively, if the overall rating function is greater than or equal to a certain threshold, is less than or equal to another threshold, or is between the two thresholds. The proposed framework for 3-way analysis of similarity is complementary to studies of similarity based on features of photos.