Sensitivity and Specificity - Terminology in Information Retrieval

Terminology in Information Retrieval

In information retrieval positive predictive value is called precision, and sensitivity is called recall.

The F-score can be used as a single measure of performance of the test. The F-score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall:

In the traditional language of statistical hypothesis testing, the sensitivity of a test is called the statistical power of the test, although the word power in that context has a more general usage that is not applicable in the present context. A sensitive test will have fewer Type II errors.