Experiment Precision Measures and Methods for Experiment Comparisons

The notion of experiment precision quantifies the variance of user ratings in a subjective experiment. Although there exist measures that assess subjective experiment precision, to the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic framework in the Multimedia Quality Assessment (MQA) field for comparing subjective experiments in terms of their precision. Therefore, the main idea of this paper is to propose a framework for comparing subjective experiments in the field of MQA based on appropriate experiment precision measures. We present three experiment precision measures and three related experiment precision comparison methods. We analyze the performance of the measures by using data from real-world Quality of Experience (QoE) subjective experiments. We believe our experiment precision assessment framework will help compare different subjective experiment methodologies. For example, it may help decide which methodology results in more precise user ratings. This may potentially inform future standardization activities.