algorithm used to calculate 5 star ratings

问题:

I need to calculate 5-star ratings like the one on Amazon website. I have done enough search to find what is the best algorithm, but I am not able to get a proper answer. For example, if these are the ratings

5 star - 252
4 star - 124
3 star - 40
2 star - 29
1 star - 33

totally 478 reviews

Amazon has calculated this to be "4.1 out of 5 stars". Can anyone tell me how this figure is arrived at? I am not able to get this just by doing average.

回答1:

That's a weighted average, where you weigh each rating with the number of votes it got:

(5*252 + 4*124 + 3*40 + 2*29 + 1*33) / (252+124+40+29+33) = 4.11 and change

回答2:

If you are start calculation of overall rating from beginning then this formula will help you.

Formula

((Overall Rating * Total Rating) + new Rating) / (Total Rating + 1)

Example

suppose you have no ratings till now then formula is like, overall rating is "0" till now. total rating "0" and given rating is "4"

((0*0)+4)/1 = 4

If overall rating is "4.11" Total rating is "478" And new rating giving by one user is "2"

then formula is like

((4.11 * 478)+ 2)/479 // 479 is increment of new rating from 478

回答3:

There is a really great write up on this topic at evanmiller.org. He goes through and discusses the pros and cons of a few approaches and suggests a mathematically reliable way of weighting and calculating votes.

http://evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.html

回答4:

Yes, you can average them out:

(5 * 252 + 4 * 124 + 3 * 40 + 2 * 29 + 1 * 33) / 478 = 4.11

回答5:

This rating system is based on a weighted average or weighted mean. That is, they used the weight in terms of stars to compute a decimal value which rounds to 4.1. For example:

Sum of (weight * number of reviews at that weight) / total number of reviews
(5*252 + 4*124 + 3*40 + 2*29 + 1*33) / 478 = 4.1

回答6:

Super helpful reply by Blindy, here's the PHP code that's based on it. Some may find useful. The results will be 4.11 as per OP's example:

$ratings = array(
5 => 252,
4 => 124,
3 => 40,
2 => 29,
1 => 33
);

function calcAverageRating($ratings) {

$totalWeight = 0;
$totalReviews = 0;

foreach ($ratings as $weight => $numberofReviews) {
    $WeightMultipliedByNumber = $weight * $numberofReviews;
    $totalWeight += $WeightMultipliedByNumber;
    $totalReviews += $numberofReviews;
}

//divide the total weight by total number of reviews
$averageRating = $totalWeight / $totalReviews;

return $averageRating;
}

回答7:

You may want to check this algorithm out: Calculating Average Rating the Right Way using PHP and MySQL - there's no need of saving each "star" (aka rating grade) and its corresponding number of votes and then having to retrieve thousands of rows from the database every time you need to calculate their average. (unless you want to display exactly how many people rated the given item with 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 stars)

回答8:

Weighted average, sum the number of stars times its weight, and then divide it through by the total number of reviews.

回答9:

a better way to do this,

rating = (sum_of_rating * 5)/sum_of_max_rating_of_user_count  

example:

total users rated: 6  
sum_of_max_rating_of_user_count: 6 x 5 = 30  
sum_of_rating: 25

rating = (25 * 5) / 30

Done!