One-parameter criteria

This section began with Recall and Precision, the two most typical measures of search engine performance. From that beginning, even richer, more elaborate characterizations of how well the system is performing have been considered. But even having the two measures of Recall and Precision means that it is not a simple matter to decide whether one system is better or worse than another. What are we to think of a system that has good Recall but poor precision, relative to another with the opposite bug/feature?

For example, if we wish to optimize a search engine with respect to one or more design parameters (e.g., the exact form of the query/document matching function, cf. Section §5.3.1 ), effective optimization becomes much more difficult in MULTI-CRITERIAL cases. Such thinking has generated composite'' measures based on the basic components of recall and precision.

For example, Nordine and van Rijsbergen [Jardine71] [vanR73] originally proposed the F-MEASURE for this purpose \beq F_{\beta} \equiv \frac{(\beta^{2}+1) \cdot \mathname{Precision} \cdot \mathname{Recall} } {\beta^{2} \mathname{Precision} + \mathname{Recall}} \eeq \vanR{174} has since defined the closely related EFFECTIVENESS meaurure $E$ which uses $\alpha$ to smoothly vary the emphasis given to precision vs. recall: \beq {E_{\alpha}} \equiv 1- \left(\frac{\alpha}{\mathname{Precision}}+\frac{1-\alpha}{\mathname{Recall}}\right)^{-1} \eeq The transform $\alpha = \frac{1}{\beta^2 + 1}$ converts easily between the two formulations, with $E = 1 - F$. \vanR{174} also presents an argument that a perfectly even-handed balance of precision against recall at $\alpha = 0.5$ is most appropriate.

As discussed at some length in Section §7.4 , it is possible to view retrieval as a type of classification task: given a set of features for each document (e.g., the keywords it contains), classifiy it as either \Rel or \IRel with respect to some query. Lewis and Gale [Lewis94b] have used the $F_{\beta}$ measure in the context of text classification tasks, and also recommend a focus on the same $\beta=1.0$ balance. CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY measures how often the classification is correct. If we associate the choice to retrieve a document with classifiying it as \Rel, we can use the variables defined in the contingency table of Figure (FOAref) : \mathname{Accuracy} \equiv \frac{\mid Retr \cap Rel \mid + \mid \overline{Retr} \cap \overline{Rel} \mid}{\mathname{NDoc}}

Subsections

FOA © R. K. Belew - 00-09-21