Re:Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books
by joelhoffman on Friday February 08, 2019 @02:07PM
(#19117603)
It's always worth checking the distribution. A 3 star rating with a normal-ish curve is very different than a 3 star rating with a lot of 5s and 1s -- and in that case the reviews will tell you clearly whose preconceived worldview the content fits.
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That's a good point -- I wish we could see Sparklines-like histograms of reviews.
On a related note, for binary (good/bad) reviews, we can the temper the results by assuming a beta(1,1)-distributed prior and then updating [1]. The expectation (which can thought of as an "adjusted average rating") ends up being:
E[x] = (good + 1)/(good + bad + 2)
This adjusts for situations where the number of reviews is small, in which a good average rating can be misleading.
[1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/27/bayesian-amazon/