Precision is vanity, recall is sanity.

Quote of the Week 42

"Precision is vanity, recall is sanity."
― Martin White



Title of a recent blog article by Martin White.
 
For a lot of use cases in information management and search ("finding all the relevant results"), false positives (as a result of lesser precision) are easier to handle than false negatives (as a result of insufficient recall) as one might not even know these misses exist in the information base ("You don't know what you don't know").

For more information on Type I ("false positive") vs. Type II ("false negative") Errors see for example Wikipedia.

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