I think you will have the most luck redefining your question. I'll propose a different measure and then suggest a way to find it here: Basically, you think you are looking for the highest rated item, but here's another way of phrasing this that is more useful- you want to display the item that you believe has the highest percentage chance of being one a user will like. Why don't you use statistics standardly accepted "margin of error" or "confidence" formulas to equalize this out? Here's my proposed algorithm: 1. Assign everything a percentage score (based on pure division. 5/5 with 1000 votes is 100%, 5/5 with 2 votes is 100%, 3/5 with 1000 votes is 60%, etc). 2. Based on the sample size (number of voters) as opposed to your total user base (number of registered users), find the margin of error using the standard formula found in this gif: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/7/3/a/73a9acf851e5c9fe3cdfcf52a1612cd0.png 3. Penalize every score by decrementing it by the largest assumable negative margin of error (better safe than sorry). This will all work out very nicely due to the laws of statistics. The 5/5 with 100 votes will fall to something like 98%, whereas the 5/5 with only 2 votes will have an absurd margin of error (since 2 tells you almost nothing) and fall to something like 40%, thereby losing out to the only minorly decremented 3/5 with 100 votes, which might fall to something like 58%. What does anybody else think of this algorithm?

In reply to Re: Sorting Votes, Confidence & Deviations by billisdog
in thread Sorting Votes, Confidence & Deviations by saintly

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