Search code examples
medianinformation-retrieval

Is there any example of the median for IR?

I've heard that some information retrieval techniques use the median as an aggregation operator. Is it possible to use the median to merge ranked lists of documents? Could you specify some examples?

Thanks.

Solution

  • The median has been used extensively in Machine Learning techniques. It is a good option when we search for a representative value of the sample which discards outliers.

    The median has been considered in the Ranking Fusion context, where a set of rankings is presented and the aim is to find a representative ranking from the set. In this article "A Theoretical Study on Six Classifier Fusion Strategies" of L. Kuncheva it can be seen a theoretical comparison between the most common statistics: mean, max, min, median, etc.

    There are many more contexts where the median is used, not as a main objective, but rather as a intermediate result to reach another objective.

    Hope it will be helpful!