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Re:How Not to Sort by Average Rating (2009) by vcdimension on Thursday July 09, 2015 @09:23AM (#9857671)
You're still relying on the central limit theorem (i.e. a reasonable amount of data) : using t instead of z just corrects for the fact that you only have sample variances instead of population variances. However, I suppose it's not unreasonable to assume that the ratings are likely to have a bell shaped distribution (which could be checked), so the normal/t approximation is probably going to be OK.
Re:How Not to Sort by Average Rating (2009) by stdbrouw on Thursday July 09, 2015 @09:33AM (#9857737)
Ah yes, true. Let's call it a bias/variance tradeoff ;-)