Publication Data
Star Quality: Aggregating Reviews to Rank Products and Merchants
Abstract: Given a set of reviews of products or merchants from a wide
range of authors and several reviews websites, how can we measure the true quality of
the product or merchant? How do we remove the bias of individual au- thors or sources?
How do we compare reviews obtained from different websites, where ratings may be on
differ- ent scales (1-5 stars, A/B/C, etc.)? How do we filter out unreliable reviews to
use only the ones with “star qual- ity”? Taking into account these considerations, we
an- alyze data sets from a variety of different reviews sites (the first paper, to our
knowledge, to do this). These data sets include 8 million product reviews and 1.5
million merchant reviews. We explore statistic- and heuristic- based models for
estimating the true quality of a prod- uct or merchant, and compare the performance of
these estimators on the task of ranking pairs of objects. We also apply the same models
to the task of using Netflix ratings data to rank pairs of movies, and discover that
the performance of the different models is surprisingly similar on this data set.
