Ranking List Dispersion as a Query Performance Predictor.
Joaquín Pérez-Iglesias, Lourdes Araujo
Proc. International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2009).
LNCS 5766, pp. 371-374, Springer (2009).

In this paper we introduce a novel approach for query performance prediction based on ranking list scores
dispersion. Starting from the hypothesis that different score distributions appear for good and poor
performance queries, we introduce a set of measures that capture these differences between both types of
distributions. The use of measures based on standard deviation of ranking list scores, as a prediction value,
shows a significant correlation degree in terms of average precision.