https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180728083513.htm

It was a mutual Beatles passion -- discovered at a conference on Prince Edward Island -- that led Mark Glickman, senior lecturer in statistics at Harvard, and Jason Brown, professor of mathematics at Dalhousie University, to wonder whether a stylometric approach could answer the burning question: Lennon or McCartney?

As Glickman explains, for most Lennon-McCartney songs, it is well-known and well-documented which of the two wrote the song. However, a surprisingly large number of songs (or portions of songs) have disputed authorship. As an example, no one knows who wrote the music for "In My Life," a track from the 1965 album Rubber Soul, which is ranked 23 on Rolling Stone's The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Both Lennon and McCartney remembered differently. "So, we wondered whether you could use data analysis techniques to try to figure out what was going on in the song to distinguish whether it was by one or the other," says Glickman.