Discounted cumulative gain

Discounted cumulative gain (DCG) is a measure of ranking quality in information retrieval. It is often normalized so that it is comparable across queries, giving Normalized DCG (nDCG or NDCG). NDCG is often used to measure effectiveness of search engine algorithms and related applications. Using a graded relevance scale of documents in a search-engine result set, DCG sums the usefulness, or gain, of the results discounted by their position in the result list.[1] NDCG is DCG normalized by the maximum possible DCG of the result set when ranked from highest to lowest gain, thus adjusting for the different numbers of relevant results for different queries.

  1. ^ Kalervo Järvelin, Jaana Kekäläinen, "Cumulated gain-based evaluation of IR techniques". ACM Transactions on Information Systems 20(4), 422–446 (2002)