Retrieval Metrics At Your Fingertips
Recall the practical use of precision, recall, precision@k, and NDCG in vector-search evaluation.
When do you use recall? Think missing evidence. Use recall when the costly failure is failing to retrieve relevant items at all. Legal review, safety search, and broad research often need recall guardrails. When do you use precision@k? Think first page. Use precision@k when users inspect only the first k results and bad hits waste attention. For support agents who scan five results, precision@5 is more meaningful than broad recall alone. Recall@50 vs precision@5: which one answers which question? Compare Most production scorecards need both when candidate generation and final ranking can fail separately. Stakeholder: 'Can we just use one…
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