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I appreciate people who take the time to apply math to things in the real world, and share it with non academic crowds. Thanks for that. 5 star rating systems

• tripzilch 15y ago
  > 5 star rating systems are obnoxious. From a mathematical perspective, if you treat them in an ordinal fashion they are poorly behaved, and if you treat them categorically, you lose the relationship between stars. Helping out a friend with a statistics test, I recently read up about the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test[1]. Now this one is intended to get a p-value for experiments with "before" and "after" measurements, but what I got the idea it's trying to do, is to use the ranks of a not-very-normal behaving random variable, turn that into a summation of lots of things, so due to the central limit theorem you can treat it as a normal distribution again. Though thinking about it, in this case it's the rank we're after, so maybe it's not useful at all. But it gives an interesting idea about the tricks you can pull if your input data isn't quite the sort of type that you can analyse very well. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilcoxon_signed-rank_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilcoxon_signed-rank_test