为了简单起见，我化简了向量a和b:

Let :
    a : [1, 1, 0]
    b : [1, 0, 1]

那么余弦相似度(Theta)

 (Theta) = (1*1 + 1*0 + 0*1)/sqrt((1^2 + 1^2))* sqrt((1^2 + 1^2)) = 1/2 = 0.5

cos0.5的逆是60度。

两个向量A和B存在于二维空间或三维空间中，它们之间的夹角为cos相似度。

如果角度更大(可以达到最大180度)，即Cos 180=-1，最小角度为0度。cos0 =1意味着向量是对齐的，因此向量是相似的。

cos 90=0(这足以得出向量A和B根本不相似，因为距离不能为负，余弦值将在0到1之间。因此，更多的角度意味着降低相似性(视觉化也有意义)

简单的JAVA代码计算余弦相似度

/**
   * Method to calculate cosine similarity of vectors
   * 1 - exactly similar (angle between them is 0)
   * 0 - orthogonal vectors (angle between them is 90)
   * @param vector1 - vector in the form [a1, a2, a3, ..... an]
   * @param vector2 - vector in the form [b1, b2, b3, ..... bn]
   * @return - the cosine similarity of vectors (ranges from 0 to 1)
   */
  private double cosineSimilarity(List<Double> vector1, List<Double> vector2) {

    double dotProduct = 0.0;
    double normA = 0.0;
    double normB = 0.0;
    for (int i = 0; i < vector1.size(); i++) {
      dotProduct += vector1.get(i) * vector2.get(i);
      normA += Math.pow(vector1.get(i), 2);
      normB += Math.pow(vector2.get(i), 2);
    }
    return dotProduct / (Math.sqrt(normA) * Math.sqrt(normB));
  }

这是一个简单的Python代码，实现余弦相似度。

from scipy import linalg, mat, dot
import numpy as np

In [12]: matrix = mat( [[2, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 1],[2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1]] )

In [13]: matrix
Out[13]: 
matrix([[2, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 1],
        [2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1]])
In [14]: dot(matrix[0],matrix[1].T)/np.linalg.norm(matrix[0])/np.linalg.norm(matrix[1])
Out[14]: matrix([[ 0.82158384]])

以@Bill Bell为例，在[R]中有两种方法

a = c(2,1,0,2,0,1,1,1)

b = c(2,1,1,1,1,0,1,1)

d = (a %*% b) / (sqrt(sum(a^2)) * sqrt(sum(b^2)))

或者利用crossprod()方法的性能…

e = crossprod(a, b) / (sqrt(crossprod(a, a)) * sqrt(crossprod(b, b)))

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Set;

/**
 * 
* @author Xiao Ma
* mail : 409791952@qq.com
*
*/
  public class SimilarityUtil {

public static double consineTextSimilarity(String[] left, String[] right) {
    Map<String, Integer> leftWordCountMap = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
    Map<String, Integer> rightWordCountMap = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
    Set<String> uniqueSet = new HashSet<String>();
    Integer temp = null;
    for (String leftWord : left) {
        temp = leftWordCountMap.get(leftWord);
        if (temp == null) {
            leftWordCountMap.put(leftWord, 1);
            uniqueSet.add(leftWord);
        } else {
            leftWordCountMap.put(leftWord, temp + 1);
        }
    }
    for (String rightWord : right) {
        temp = rightWordCountMap.get(rightWord);
        if (temp == null) {
            rightWordCountMap.put(rightWord, 1);
            uniqueSet.add(rightWord);
        } else {
            rightWordCountMap.put(rightWord, temp + 1);
        }
    }
    int[] leftVector = new int[uniqueSet.size()];
    int[] rightVector = new int[uniqueSet.size()];
    int index = 0;
    Integer tempCount = 0;
    for (String uniqueWord : uniqueSet) {
        tempCount = leftWordCountMap.get(uniqueWord);
        leftVector[index] = tempCount == null ? 0 : tempCount;
        tempCount = rightWordCountMap.get(uniqueWord);
        rightVector[index] = tempCount == null ? 0 : tempCount;
        index++;
    }
    return consineVectorSimilarity(leftVector, rightVector);
}

/**
 * The resulting similarity ranges from −1 meaning exactly opposite, to 1
 * meaning exactly the same, with 0 usually indicating independence, and
 * in-between values indicating intermediate similarity or dissimilarity.
 * 
 * For text matching, the attribute vectors A and B are usually the term
 * frequency vectors of the documents. The cosine similarity can be seen as
 * a method of normalizing document length during comparison.
 * 
 * In the case of information retrieval, the cosine similarity of two
 * documents will range from 0 to 1, since the term frequencies (tf-idf
 * weights) cannot be negative. The angle between two term frequency vectors
 * cannot be greater than 90°.
 * 
 * @param leftVector
 * @param rightVector
 * @return
 */
private static double consineVectorSimilarity(int[] leftVector,
        int[] rightVector) {
    if (leftVector.length != rightVector.length)
        return 1;
    double dotProduct = 0;
    double leftNorm = 0;
    double rightNorm = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < leftVector.length; i++) {
        dotProduct += leftVector[i] * rightVector[i];
        leftNorm += leftVector[i] * leftVector[i];
        rightNorm += rightVector[i] * rightVector[i];
    }

    double result = dotProduct
            / (Math.sqrt(leftNorm) * Math.sqrt(rightNorm));
    return result;
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    String left[] = { "Julie", "loves", "me", "more", "than", "Linda",
            "loves", "me" };
    String right[] = { "Jane", "likes", "me", "more", "than", "Julie",
            "loves", "me" };
    System.out.println(consineTextSimilarity(left,right));
}
}