Finally, returning to the initially-posed question of how many characters are present, we find that despite the detection error in our method, the overall predicted number of characters is quite close to the actual: for Sherlock Holmes stories, the number of characters was estimated within 2.4 on average, for Pride and Prejudice our method predicted 72 compared with 73 actual characters, and for The Moonstone our method predicted 87 compared with 78.
we argue that our procedure can provide a reasonable estimate for the total number of characters.