Skip to main content

Multiple Testing for IR and Recommendation System Experiments

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024)

Abstract

While there has been significant research on statistical techniques for comparing two information retrieval (IR) systems, many IR experiments test more than two systems. This can lead to inflated false discoveries due to the multiple-comparison problem (MCP). A few IR studies have investigated multiple comparison procedures; these studies mostly use TREC data and control the familywise error rate. In this study, we extend their investigation to include recommendation system evaluation data as well as multiple comparison procedures that controls for False Discovery Rate (FDR).

Partly supported by the National Science Foundation on Grant 17-51278.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Bellogín, A., Castells, P., Cantador, I.: Statistical biases in information retrieval metrics for recommender systems. Inf. Retriev. J. 20, 606–634 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Benjamini, Y., Hochberg, Y.: Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. J. Roy. Stat. Soc.: Ser. B (Methodol.) 57(1), 289–300 (1995)

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  3. Benjamini, Y., Yekutieli, D.: The control of the false discovery rate in multiple testing under dependency. Annals Stat. 29(4), 1165–1188 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bland, J.M., Altman, D.G.: Multiple significance tests: the bonferroni method. BMJ 310(6973), 170 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Boytsov, L., Belova, A., Westfall, P.: Deciding on an adjustment for multiplicity in IR experiments. In: Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 403–412 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Carterette, B.A.: Multiple testing in statistical analysis of systems-based information retrieval experiments. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 30(1), 1–34 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2094072.2094076

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Hagen, M., et al.: Webis at trec 2013-session and web track. In: TREC (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Harper, F.M., Konstan, J.A.: The movielens datasets: history and context. ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst. 5(4), 1–19 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Holm, S.: A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure. Scand. J. Statist. 65–70 (1979)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Hull, D.: Using statistical testing in the evaluation of retrieval experiments. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 329–338 (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ihemelandu, N., Ekstrand, M.D.: Statistical inference: the missing piece of recsys experiment reliability discourse. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.06424 (2021)

  12. Ihemelandu, N., Ekstrand, M.D.: Inference at scale: significance testing for large search and recommendation experiments. In: Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023) (2023)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Jones, K.S., Willett, P.: Readings in Information Retrieval. Morgan Kaufmann (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Parapar, J., Losada, D.E., Presedo-Quindimil, M.A., Barreiro, A.: Using score distributions to compare statistical significance tests for information retrieval evaluation. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 71(1), 98–113 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Rijsbergen, C.V.: Van. Information Retrieval, vol. 2. Butterworths (1979)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Savoy, J.: Statistical inference in retrieval effectiveness evaluation. Inf. Process. Manag. 33(4), 495–512 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Scheffé, H.: A method for judging all contrasts in the analysis of variance. Biometrika 40(1–2), 87–110 (1953)

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  18. Smucker, M.D., Allan, J., Carterette, B.: A comparison of statistical significance tests for information retrieval evaluation. In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 623–632 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Tague-Sutcliffe, J.: The pragmatics of information retrieval experimentation, revisited. Inf. Process. Manag. 28(4), 467–490 (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Tague-Sutcliffe, J., Blustein, J.: A Statistical Analysis of the Trec-3 Data, pp. 385–385. NIST Special Publication SP (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Urbano, J., Lima, H., Hanjalic, A.: Statistical significance testing in information retrieval: an empirical analysis of type I, type II and type III errors. In: Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 505–514 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Urbano, J., Nagler, T.: Stochastic simulation of test collections: evaluation scores. In: Proceedings of the 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 695–704 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ngozi Ihemelandu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Ihemelandu, N., Ekstrand, M.D. (2024). Multiple Testing for IR and Recommendation System Experiments. In: Goharian, N., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14610. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56063-7_37

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56063-7_37

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-56062-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-56063-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics