Precision, Recall, and Relevance
“ How relevant is your response? ” A simple question to ask, but figuring out the answer can easily lead you down a rabbit-hole. Before we go down that though, let’s first take a look at what “ Relevant ” actually means. “ Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first.” — Wiki Or, to put it differently, Relevance is all about connections , between ideas, concepts, topics, communications, whatever. In short, when we want to know how relevant something is, what we’re actually asking is how connected it is to something else you are interested in. Relevance becomes, well, relevant when we start thinking about accuracy in responses. For example, let’s say we’re talking about cats (because, cats! ). If you ask me how many pictures of cats I’ve tweeted, and I respond 211 (note: not an accurat...