In a recent blog post, I discussed the interaction between recall, precision, prevalence, storage costs, and review costs in the context of information governance.
Backstop has now created an experimental Information Governance Calculator, to help illustrate these interactions and to calculate the savings made possible through IG in conjunction with predictive coding. The calculator and associated graphs may be accessed at this URL:
http://www.backstopllp.com/igcalc/igcalc.html
Points of interest that may be gleaned from the calculator include:
- The higher the precision, the lower the storage costs and the greater the storage savings, all other things being equal. The inverse is also true.
- The available storage savings correlate directly with the document population size (unsurprisingly).
- Higher prevalence leads to higher storage costs at any given accuracy level (viz., at any given combination of recall and precision). The same is true as document population increases.
- Review cost (to find random exemplars) depends entirely upon and correlates directly with prevalence, and is independent of document population size.
- Low precision does not affect review costs, unlike in the context of review-to-produce.
- Total cost often declines as recall increases because of the decreased random review burden.
- In general, it should not be difficult to create a predictive-coding model because (non-random) relevant exemplars will be abundant and easily identified in the IG context. Difficulty in finding relevant exemplars will occasion additional review costs.
The calculator currently shows storage savings only. It may be updated in the future to calculate total cost savings and ROI by incorporating the cost of predictive coding. The per-document predictive-coding cost must be lower than the per-document storage cost to make the IG exercise worthwhile. Given the minuscule cost of storage relative to common predictive-coding costs, and how much easier it is to store documents than to apply predictive coding to them, this undertaking may be viable principally for exceptionally large volumes of documents that generate sufficient revenue to yield a per-document cost far below (by at least one order of magnitude) what is typical in the review-to-produce context.
