Research in IR puts a strong focus on evaluation, with many past and ongoing evaluation campaigns. However, most evaluations utilize offline experiments with single queries only, while most IR applications are interactive, with multiple queries in a session. Moreover, context (e.g., time, location, access device, task) is rarely considered. Finally, the large variance of search topic difficulty make performance prediction especially hard.

Several types of prediction may be relevant in IR. One case is that we have a system and a collection and we would like to know what happens when we move to a new collection, keeping the same kind of task. In another case, we have a system, a collection, and a kind of task, and we move to a new kind of task. A further case is when collections are fluid, and the task must be supported over changing data.

Current approaches to evaluation mean that predictability can be poor, in particular:

• Assumptions or simplifications made for experimental purposes may be of unknown or unquantified validity; they may be implicit. Collection scale (in particular, numbers of queries) may be unrealistically small or fail to capture ordinary variability.
• Test collections tend to be specific, and to have assumed use-cases; they are rarely as heterogeneous as ordinary search. The processes by which they are constructed may rely on hidden assumptions or properties.
• Test environments rarely explore cases such as poorly specified queries, or the different uses of repeated queries (re-finding versus showing new material versus query exploration, for example). Characteristics such as "the space of queries from which the test cases have been sampled" may be undefined.
• Researchers typically rely on point estimates for the performance measures, instead of giving confidence intervals. Thus, we are not even able to make a prediction about the results for another sample from the same population. A related confound is that highly correlated measures (for example, Mean Average Precision (MAP) vs normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG)) are reported as if they were independent; while, on the other hand, measures which reflect different quality aspects (such as precision and recall) are averaged (usually with a harmonic mean), thus obscuring their explanatory power.
• Current analysis tools are focused on sensitivity (differences between systems) rather than reliability (consistency over queries).
• Summary statistics are used to demonstrate differences, but the differences remain unexplained. Averages are reported without analysis of changes in individual queries.

Perhaps the most significant issue is the gap between offline and online evaluation. Correlations between system performance, user behavior, and user satisfaction are not well understood, and offline predictions of changes in user satisfaction continue to be poor because the mapping from metrics to user perceptions and experiences is not well understood.