* Niklas Wenzel <[email protected]> wrote: > Apparently, apps are currently only sorted by their star > ratings. ... most top-notch applications are beaten by webapps > whose owners give them a single 5 star rating.
There are pretty simple scoring mechanisms which should be able to vastly improve the sorting... The most common one I'm aware of is to use average plus certainty to come up with an overall score. The exact algorithm can vary, but the basic idea is to get the mean average and standard deviation and then shift the score from the mean toward the middle by an amount influenced by standard deviation and total number of star ratings. So, an un-rated app would count as 3 / 5 stars. As more people give it 5-star ratings, its score would rise but never quite reach 5/5. Or, as people give it 1-star ratings its score would drop but never quite reach 1/5. If the standard deviation is large, it wouldn't shift as much as if the ratings all cluster tightly together. And if it has a lot of ratings, the score can be higher or lower than an app with fewer ratings (but only if the ratings mostly agree). This is basically the same way IMDB calculates movie scores. I'm also using it in my music player to guess at the scores of unrated songs, to make its "smart random" mode smarter. I suspect the app store could do the same. -- Selene -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
