Following Stefano Mizzaro’s presentation on Axiometrics, in this talk we will review and compare the most popular evaluation metrics for Clustering and Filtering tasks. In order to compare and assess the adequacy of metrics, we will specify a few intuitive formal constraints for each task, which every suitable metric should satisfy. The analysis leads to some practical conclusions: for the clustering problem, there is only a metric pair (Bcubed Precision and Recall) that satisfies all formal constraints. For filtering metrics, we end up distinguishing three metric families which have mutually exclusive properties. The results provide useful guidance to select the most adequate evaluation metric for each application scenario.

Lecturer: Dr. Julio Gonzalo