pointwise score
Model selection with proper scoring rules on data sets of time series: prefer the mean scaled score
Corani, Giorgio, Damato, Stefano, Azzimonti, Dario, Zambon, Lorenzo
We study the problem of model selection among probabilistic forecasting models evaluated on datasets of multiple time series. The performance of a model on a single time series is quantified by the average value (score) of a proper scoring rule over a test set, but extending model selection to data sets of time series requires aggregating these scores. Common approaches either rely on scaling scores and averaging them (mean scaled score) or avoid scaling by using alternative statistics such as mean ranks or win rates. However, these approaches can yield conflicting conclusions. We show that such discrepancies arise from the skewness of the distribution of the scores, which is particularly pronounced when test sets are short. The skewness can cause non-mean criteria (e.g., mean rank, median, win rate) to select misspecified models. In contrast, the mean score is immune from this problem. We further show that, as the size of the test sets increases, all aggregation criteria converge to the same model selection decision, mitigating these discrepancies. Our experiments on intermittent demand time series, including data from the M5 competition, highlight the importance of sufficiently large test sets; the mean scaled score appears to be the more reliable approach, also because empirically we found its decision to remain consistent when different scaling factors are adopted.
Beyond Pointwise Scores: Decomposed Criteria-Based Evaluation of LLM Responses
Yu, Fangyi, Seedat, Nabeel, Herrmannova, Dasha, Schilder, Frank, Schwarz, Jonathan Richard
Evaluating long-form answers in high-stakes domains such as law or medicine remains a fundamental challenge. Standard metrics like BLEU and ROUGE fail to capture semantic correctness, and current LLM-based evaluators often reduce nuanced aspects of answer quality into a single undifferentiated score. We introduce DeCE, a decomposed LLM evaluation framework that separates precision (factual accuracy and relevance) and recall (coverage of required concepts), using instance-specific criteria automatically extracted from gold answer requirements. DeCE is model-agnostic and domain-general, requiring no predefined taxonomies or handcrafted rubrics. We instantiate DeCE to evaluate different LLMs on a real-world legal QA task involving multi-jurisdictional reasoning and citation grounding. DeCE achieves substantially stronger correlation with expert judgments ($r=0.78$), compared to traditional metrics ($r=0.12$), pointwise LLM scoring ($r=0.35$), and modern multidimensional evaluators ($r=0.48$). It also reveals interpretable trade-offs: generalist models favor recall, while specialized models favor precision. Importantly, only 11.95% of LLM-generated criteria required expert revision, underscoring DeCE's scalability. DeCE offers an interpretable and actionable LLM evaluation framework in expert domains.