A probabilistic interpretation of precision, recall and F-score, with implication for evaluation

  • Authors:
  • Cyril Goutte;Eric Gaussier

  • Affiliations:
  • Xerox Research Centre Europe, Meylan, France;Xerox Research Centre Europe, Meylan, France

  • Venue:
  • ECIR'05 Proceedings of the 27th European conference on Advances in Information Retrieval Research
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

We address the problems of 1/ assessing the confidence of the standard point estimates, precision, recall and F-score, and 2/ comparing the results, in terms of precision, recall and F-score, obtained using two different methods. To do so, we use a probabilistic setting which allows us to obtain posterior distributions on these performance indicators, rather than point estimates. This framework is applied to the case where different methods are run on different datasets from the same source, as well as the standard situation where competing results are obtained on the same data.