AP (Average Precision)

Average Precision (AP) is a metric used to evaluate how well a system identifies relevant items among many, such as in search results or object detection. It measures the balance between correctly finding relevant items and avoiding false alarms across different confidence levels. Specifically, AP summarizes the precision (correctness of positive identifications) at various points where the system identifies items, averaging these to provide a single score. A higher AP indicates the system consistently detects relevant items accurately, combining both the quality of detections and the ranking order in which they are presented.