Ranking crowdsourced data with curves

http://www.cederman.com/?p=116

by timcederman • 18 years ago

8 3 18 years ago

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

As someone who works (sort of) for Tripadvisor, I found this interesting. I'm a little suspect that "Since I changed tactics, I have been having great hotel experiences." is confirmation bias, though.

timcederman• 18 years ago

Maybe. I had a string of pretty crappy hotels, so started paying more attention to the reviews and noticed that although the hotels I had been staying at had higher averages, they had a lot less 5 star ratings. Next few hotels were much better, and when the option to get a hotel with a better curve wasn't available, I was appropriately disappointed. While I would like to think that I don't suffer from confirmation bias, this certainly isn't a double blind trial.

I have also seen a similar phenomenon with restaurants on Yelp though, which has been slightly easier to test in that I can try two similar restaurants with the different shaped curves.

greendestiny• 18 years ago

I tried a similar approach with the netflix prize, although in that case I fitted truncated normal distributions to the data.

Ranking crowdsourced data with curves

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