Observations and Analyses

Abstract

Due to the uncertainty involved, it is difficult to answer questions such as why and how data fusion can improve retrieval performance, which data fusion method is better, or in what condition the data fusion methods can improve retrieval performance. However, in the last two decades, some effort has been taken to try to find some sort of answer to these questions. It is understandable that statistical analysis plays a very important role. In this chapter, we are going to discuss some progress already made in this regard.