[new] using higher precision

Ideas to improve Criticker and new feature requests, as well as announcements about new enhancements.
livelove
Posts: 759
0 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Thu Sep 17, 2015 9:36 pm

[new] using higher precision

Post by livelove »

The 10 tiers effectively translate the user's rankings from whatever scale the user employs to a scale from 1-10. But that is a quite coarse scale. The user's films essentially receive a ranking of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 or 10 and only then are compared to other users' films.

I am afraid that this can falsify the results.

Back in school, we were told to avoid rounding at intermediate steps, as this increases the margin of error.

I understand the need to harmonize different user scales to be able to compare them, but couldn't you avoid the rounding and use a scale with higher precision, so that you would compare a film with e.g. a score of 7.45 to a film with a score of 7.60, instead of a tier-7 film to a tier-8 film ?

Given that a single new/modified ranking can be enough to push a whole set of rankings from e.g. tier 9 to tier 8, all those films which might previously have matched another user's tier 9 films with a difference of 0, now all have a difference of 1, which is quite a big change! See illustration below:

Image

This would not happen if a higher precision scale were used.
So what reason is there for not using higher precision ?

As I have not yet mentioned it explicitly:
using higher precision would be my feature suggestion.
2 decimal places would certainly suffice to improve the accuracy.

Post Reply