Progress Through Regression. Modeling Style across Genre in French Classical Theater

In this paper we test the hypothesis that authorial style depends on genre and find that the stylistic signatures
of authors do indeed vary significantly, even when only considering the most frequent function words. We test
this hypothesis by comparing the out-of-sample predictions of three different multinomial logistic regression
models. We discuss our findings with regard to stylistic variation at the level of words and in the context of
existing knowledge about literary genres in the Classical Age. We conclude by advocating adding logistical
regression to the stylometric toolbox as a flexible way to investigate how authors' writing varies depending on
context.