Returning a ratio

Hey all

I am trying to calculate the "popularity" of an item. Items can be rated using integers from 0 to 5. What I do now is that I only calculate the average of all the ratings for an item, this is of course not enough because the number of times an item has been rated should also be an important factor when deciding an item's popularity.

(An item with the average rating of 5 which has been rated 20 times should be more popular than an item which has the average rating of 5 and has been rated 10 times for example).

What is the best way for returning the avg Rating/n Ratings as a Double? I can always return the ratio as a String, but I don't know if that's the smoothest way of doing it. I am thinking of doing: avg rating * n ratings / n ratings. Is this a good way of returning the ratio as a Double or are there more accurate algorithms for doing it?

Code so far (will return Double when I've figured out which algorithm to use)

public Integer calculatePopularity(List<Integer> values){

if(values.size() == 0){

return 0;

}

try{

Integer result = 0;

for(Integer i : values){

result = result + i;

}

return result * values.size()/values.size();

}catch (Exception e){

e.printStackTrace();

return 0;

}

}

[1873 byte] By [syncroa] at [2007-10-2 17:34:35]