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Mean Average Precision (MAP)/Evidence
Method evidence record

Mean Average Precision (MAP)

Mean Average Precision (MAP) is the classic single-number summary of ranked-retrieval effectiveness under binary relevance and the headline metric of the TREC ad hoc retrieval tracks. For a single query, average precision (AP) computes the precision of the result list at each rank where a relevant document appears and averages those values, rewarding systems that rank all relevant documents highly; MAP is then the mean of AP across a set of queries. Buckley and Voorhees's 2000 SIGIR analysis of evaluation-measure stability showed that average precision is among the most stable and discriminating IR measures, requiring fewer queries than alternatives like precision at a fixed cutoff to reliably tell two systems apart. MAP remains a standard reporting metric for ranked retrieval, complementing graded-relevance measures such as nDCG.

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Mean Average Precision (MAP) for Ranked Retrieval Evaluation
Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / bibliometrics
  • Buckley, C., & Voorhees, E. M. (2000). Evaluating evaluation measure stability. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '00), 33-40. · DOI 10.1145/345508.345543
  • Manning, C. D., Raghavan, P., & Schütze, H. (2008). Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press. · ISBN 9780521865715
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Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Same method familyBM25 Probabilistic Ranking (Okapi)machine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyCitation Context and Sentiment Analysismachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Taxonomic bucketNormalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG)machine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.

Evidence status

Sources recorded, not reviewed

Bibliographic sources are present. Claim-level evidence review has not been performed.

Sources

2 recorded citations, copied from the method source record.

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