cooccurring

Cooccurring is an adjective describing phenomena that occur together in time, space, or context. The term is used across disciplines to indicate overlap or simultaneous occurrence, rather than a causal relationship by itself.

In statistics, data mining, and information retrieval, cooccurrence refers to two or more items appearing within a defined window, such as a document, sentence, or time interval. Analysts measure association with metrics like frequency, mutual information, chi-square, or odds ratio to assess the strength of the connection between items.

In linguistics and natural language processing, cooccurrence analyzes how words or linguistic units appear near each other. Cooccurrence patterns support the identification of collocations, semantic relatedness, and topic modeling, often represented in cooccurrence matrices or network graphs.

In mental health and medicine, the phrase cooccurring disorders (often referred to as comorbidity) describes the simultaneous presence of two or more disorders in a single individual. Cooccurring conditions can complicate diagnosis and treatment, require integrated care, and influence prognosis. The terminology has evolved with emphasis on integrated, person-centered approaches rather than treating conditions in isolation.

In other uses, cooccurring events may refer to coincident events in time series, adapters in experimental design, or ecological phenomena where species or factors co-occur in a habitat.

See also: co-occurrence, comorbidity, correlation, contingency.