# Calculating fragmentation between lists

I'm not very mathematically oriented (working on fixing that) so excuse me if this is basic :)

I need to calculate "fragmentation ratio" - the best name I could come up with the thing I'm trying to achieve.

I have 400 different lists where each list contains 20 named items (with some meta data). Same name item can exist in multiple lists. I calculated that in my dataset there's 326 unique items among those 8000 items (400*20).

So where I stumble is that how do I calculate a meaningful value for fragmentation of items between those lists?

--- edit ---

It looks like I was even more vague and hard to understand than I thought.

I researched this a bit more and I think better term for this would be similarities between lists and calculating that from the collection.

Here's a small example of the data structures:

List 1: ['this','is','a','list']
List 2: ['is','it']
List 3: ['yes,'it','is','list']


Now what I would like to quantify is how much similarities these arrays share.

Does this explain my problem any better? :)

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It's OK to ask a vague question and make specifying the question more precisely a part of the question, but you've taken that to an extreme -- you haven't made any attempt at all at describing what you're trying to quantify, beyond calling it "fragmentation". I for one don't can't form a clear idea of what you're after from just that one word. – joriki Dec 21 '12 at 15:33
I added a bit more to hopefully make it more understandable. – James D. Dec 21 '12 at 17:45