# Rating normalization algorithm

I have a rating system where users can vote between 1-6. I'd like to normalize the votes a bit to better accommodate for extreme voting, where individuals tend to vote as high or as low as possible. To do this, I have the following algorithm which seems to work well. However, it's extremely inefficient and not very well written.

What might I do to improve it?

protected function calculateWeightedAverage($ratings) {$values = array_values($ratings); sort($values);

$count = count($values);
$weights = array_fill(0,$count, 1);

$out = (int) ($count / 3);
$out2 = pow($out + 1, 2);

$max =$count - 1;
$min = 0; for ($i = 0; $i <$out; $i++) {$j = $i + 1;$weights[$min +$i] = $j *$j / $out2;$weights[$max -$i] = $j *$j / $out2; }$sum = array_sum($weights); for ($i = 0; $i <$count; $i++) {$weights[$i] /=$sum;
}

$rating = 0; for ($i = 0; $i <$count; $i++) {$rating += $values[$i] * $weights[$i];
}

return $rating; } • Please provide how you store$ratings and give us something concrete. – Ozan Kurt Feb 11 '16 at 19:09
• Well, $ratings comes in as an array [userid => vote, ... ] but we're using array_values() so$values is just an array of integers 1-6. – user1960364 Feb 11 '16 at 19:16
• Okay now it makes sense. I will have a look asap. – Ozan Kurt Feb 11 '16 at 19:17
• Although I realize we should be able to divine it from your code, any chance you could give us a brief description of what the function is doing? – Barry Carter Feb 11 '16 at 21:46
• It sorts them and then applies a weight to the upper third (count / 3) and lower third items in the array, giving majority weight to values in the middle. For instance, if the votes were [1, 4, 7], the weight of the 1 and 7 would be decreased before calculating the average. If it were [2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 7] the weights of the 2, 2, second 4, and 7 would be lowered. – user1960364 Feb 11 '16 at 22:14

Your code is really good and I can't see any significant way to improve it. One minor improvement is to reduce the number of loops from 3 to 2:

protected function calculateWeightedAverage($ratings) {$sum = 0;
$rating = 0;$values = array_values($ratings); sort($values);

$count = count($values);
$out = (int) ($count / 3);
$out2 = pow($out + 1, 2);

for ($i=0;$i<$count;$i++) {
if ($i <$out) {
$weights[$i] = pow(($i+1),2)/$out2;
} elseif ($i >$count-$out-1) {$weights[$i] = pow($count-$i,2)/$out2;
} else {
$weights[$i] = 1;
}
$sum +=$weights[$i]; } for ($i = 0; $i <$count; $i++) {$rating += $values[$i] * $weights[$i]/$sum; } return$rating;
}
protected function calculateWeightedAverage($ratings) {$values = array_values($ratings); sort($values);

$count = count($values);

$out = (int) ($count / 3);
$out2 = pow($out + 1, 2);

$max =$count - 1;
$min = 0;$weights = array_fill(0, $count, 1); for ($i = 0; $i <$out; $i++) {$j = $i + 1;$weights[$min +$i] = $j *$j / $out2;$weights[$max -$i] = $j *$j / $out2; } Try removing the$min +. It is nice for the reader but may be slower for the computer to execute.

$sum = array_sum($weights);

for ($i = 0;$i < $count;$i++) {
$weights[$i] /= $sum; } This loop is unnecessary since you can simply return$rating / $sum.$rating = 0;
for ($i = 0;$i < $count;$i++) {
$rating +=$values[$i] *$weights[$i]; } Since you are looping over the arrays anyway, you could also compute the$sum in this loop. Measure it which one is faster or more readable.

return $rating; } Since this algorithm is pretty straight-forward and not really slow, maybe the slow part is the part where you get your$ratings from. When they come from a database, I would worry more about that part.

I don't know how well PHP optimizes the code. If it doesn't, it may even help to extract the $j *$j / $out2 (which you use twice) into a temporary variable. As with all performance-related topics: measure, and make sure you measure the realistic and relevant things. It's pretty hard to understand what this code does. There's a lot going on and the code doesn't communicate well what it's doing. Like the variable names$out and $out2 look completely arbitrary. My main suggestion is to split this function into two: • one where you calculate the weights, and • another where you calculate the average using these weights. This way it would become clear that the creation of$weights array only depends on the count of values, not on the values themselves.

Additionally the function only uses \$ratings assoc-array to extract values from it - therefore I would recommend only passing in the values in the first place (it shouldn't be the job of the averaging function to extract the values to be worked on).