Refining a deployed system
8.6.3 Refining a deployed system
If an IR system has been built and is being used by a large number of users, the system’s builders can evaluate possible changes by deploying variant versions of the system and recording measures that are indicative of user satisfaction with one variant vs. others as they are being used. This method is frequently used by web search engines. The most common version of this is AB testing, a term borrowed from the AB TEST advertising industry. For such a test, precisely one thing is changed between the current system and a proposed system, and a small proportion of traf- fic say, 1–10 of users is randomly directed to the variant system, while most users use the current system. For example, if we wish to investigate a change to the ranking algorithm, we redirect a random sample of users to a variant system and evaluate measures such as the frequency with which people click on the top result, or any result on the first page. This particular analysis method is referred to as clickthrough log analysis or clickstream min- CLICKTHROUGH LOG ANALYSIS CLICKSTREAM MINING ing . It is further discussed as a method of implicit feedback in Section 9.1.7 page 187 . The basis of AB testing is running a bunch of single variable tests either in sequence or in parallel: for each test only one parameter is varied from the control the current live system. It is therefore easy to see whether varying each parameter has a positive or negative effect. Such testing of a live system can easily and cheaply gauge the effect of a change on users, and, with a large enough user base, it is practical to measure even very small positive and negative effects. In principle, more analytic power can be achieved by varying multiple things at once in an uncorrelated random way, and doing standard multivariate statistical analysis, such as multiple linear regression. In practice, though, AB testing is widely used, because AB tests are easy to deploy, easy to understand, and easy to explain to management.8.7 Results snippets
Parts
» cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» An example information retrieval problem
» A first take at building an inverted index
» Processing Boolean queries cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» The extended Boolean model versus ranked retrieval
» References and further reading
» Obtaining the character sequence in a document
» Tokenization Determining the vocabulary of terms
» Dropping common terms: stop words
» Normalization equivalence classing of terms
» Stemming and lemmatization Determining the vocabulary of terms
» Faster postings list intersection via skip pointers
» Biword indexes Positional postings and phrase queries
» Positional indexes Positional postings and phrase queries
» Combination schemes Positional postings and phrase queries
» Search structures for dictionaries
» General wildcard queries Wildcard queries
» k-gram indexes for wildcard queries
» Implementing spelling correction Spelling correction
» Forms of spelling correction Edit distance
» k-gram indexes for spelling correction
» Context sensitive spelling correction
» Phonetic correction cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Hardware basics Blocked sort-based indexing
» Single-pass in-memory indexing cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Distributed indexing cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Dynamic indexing cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» References and further reading Exercises
» Heaps’ law: Estimating the number of terms Zipf’s law: Modeling the distribution of terms
» Blocked storage Dictionary compression
» Variable byte codes γ Postings file compression
» Exercises cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Weighted zone scoring Parametric and zone indexes
» Learning weights Parametric and zone indexes
» The optimal weight Parametric and zone indexes
» Inverse document frequency Term frequency and weighting
» Tf-idf weighting Term frequency and weighting
» Dot products The vector space model for scoring
» Queries as vectors Computing vector scores
» Sublinear tf scaling Maximum tf normalization
» Document and query weighting schemes Pivoted normalized document length
» Inexact top Efficient scoring and ranking
» Index elimination Champion lists
» Static quality scores and ordering
» Impact ordering Efficient scoring and ranking
» Cluster pruning Efficient scoring and ranking
» Tiered indexes Query-term proximity
» Designing parsing and scoring functions
» Vector space scoring and query operator interaction
» Information retrieval system evaluation
» Standard test collections cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Evaluation of unranked retrieval sets
» Evaluation of ranked retrieval results
» Critiques and justifications of the concept of relevance
» Results snippets cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» The Rocchio algorithm for relevance feedback
» Probabilistic relevance feedback When does relevance feedback work?
» Relevance feedback on the web
» Evaluation of relevance feedback strategies
» Pseudo relevance feedback Indirect relevance feedback
» Vocabulary tools for query reformulation Query expansion
» Basic XML concepts cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» A vector space model for XML retrieval
» Text-centric vs. data-centric XML retrieval
» Review of basic probability theory
» The 10 loss case The Probability Ranking Principle
» Deriving a ranking function for query terms
» Probability estimates in theory
» Probability estimates in practice
» Probabilistic approaches to relevance feedback
» An appraisal of probabilistic models
» Tree-structured dependencies between terms Okapi BM25: a non-binary model
» Finite automata and language models
» Multinomial distributions over words
» Using query likelihood language models in IR
» Estimating the query generation probability
» Ponte and Croft’s Experiments
» Language modeling versus other approaches in IR
» Extended language modeling approaches
» The text classification problem
» The Bernoulli model cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Mutual information Feature selection
» Frequency-based feature selection Feature selection for multiple classifiers
» Evaluation of text classification
» Document representations and measures of relatedness in vec-
» Rocchio classification cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Time complexity and optimality of kNN
» Linear versus nonlinear classifiers
» Classification with more than two classes
» The bias-variance tradeoff cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Support vector machines: The linearly separable case
» Soft margin classification Extensions to the SVM model
» Multiclass SVMs Nonlinear SVMs
» Experimental results Extensions to the SVM model
» Choosing what kind of classifier to use
» Improving classifier performance Issues in the classification of text documents
» A simple example of machine-learned scoring
» Result ranking by machine learning
» Clustering in information retrieval
» Evaluation of clustering cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Cluster cardinality in K-means
» Model-based clustering cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Centroid clustering cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Optimality of HAC cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Divisive clustering cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Cluster labeling cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Implementation notes cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Term-document matrices and singular value decompositions
» Low-rank approximations cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Latent semantic indexing cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Background and history cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» The web graph Web characteristics
» Advertising as the economic model
» Near-duplicates and shingling cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Features a crawler Features a crawler
» Distributing indexes cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Connectivity servers cambridge introductiontoinformationretrieval2008 readingversion
» Anchor text and the web graph
» The PageRank computation PageRank
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