I am not a mathematician or a statistician. But, I think the question I have is related to statistics. I will start with a made up example.
If I can grade apples into,say four grades from 1 to 4, one being the best and 4 being the worst. Now, I get two random samples of apples from two farms. The first sample has grade-1 40%, grade-2 20%, grade-3 30% and grade-4 10%. The second sample has grade-1 36%, grade-2 36%, grade-3 20% and grade-4 8%. Is there a summary statistic that can say which of the two samples agree best with the preferred ranking? The preference is to have more of the better grades.
I thought about using a weighted sum of proportions. The weight I thought was the inverse of the numerical value of the rank. This metric will have a value of one if all of the sample is grade 1 (the most preferred situation) and goes down towards zero as the sample consists less of the preferred ranks and more of the lesser preferred ranks.
The second metric I thought of is (Spearman) rank correlation between the inverse of the numerical value of the ranks and the percentages of each rank.
I will be grateful if anyone can tell me if a statistic exists that can help me chose between the two samples as having greater agreement with the ranking. If there are no such statistics, your valuable comments on the appropriateness of the two metrics I have considered and their mathematical properties in the context of example will be greatly appreciated.
Now, the real problem is related to comparison of different keyboard layouts in a language. I can arrive at a subjective ranking of various keys. From a corpus, I can find what frequency of character falls on these keys for each of the layouts. I want to be able to tell which of the layouts agree more with my ranking of keys.
Thanks,
Ajith
