arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Statistical Foundations for a Google Play User-Review Sentiment Index: Signal Fusion, Shrinkage, Distributional Validation, and Dynamic Smoothing

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Statistics > Methodology

arXiv:2609.31513 (stat)
[Submitted on 25 Sep 2026]

Title:Statistical Foundations for a Google Play User-Review Sentiment Index: Signal Fusion, Shrinkage, Distributional Validation, and Dynamic Smoothing

Authors:Marco Mandap
View a PDF of the paper titled Statistical Foundations for a Google Play User-Review Sentiment Index: Signal Fusion, Shrinkage, Distributional Validation, and Dynamic Smoothing, by Marco Mandap
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Abstract:We develop a statistically explicit sentiment index for Google Play user reviews and establish the mathematical results supporting its construction. Normalized star ratings and text-sentiment scores are treated as noisy measures of latent review valence and fused by covariance-aware inverse-variance weighting. Review-level estimates are aggregated with bounded helpfulness and recency weights, then shrunk toward a population mean using estimated precision rather than an arbitrary review-count threshold. App-level rating histograms provide a distributional diagnostic for samples returned under different API sort orders; because star ratings are discrete, classical continuous Kolmogorov-Smirnov critical values are not used. A local-level state-space model and the Kalman filter provide a denoised temporal trend. Full proofs cover the BLUE and Gaussian maximum-likelihood result, Gaussian-conjugate shrinkage, the Glivenko-Cantelli and Donsker theorems, count transformations via the delta method, and exact Gaussian Kalman filtering. A worked three-review example shows how textual complaints can materially reduce an apparently perfect star-only score.
Comments: 16 pages, 2 tables, no figures
Subjects: Methodology (stat.ME); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Applications (stat.AP)
MSC classes: 62F10 (Primary) 62C12, 62F15, 62M20, 62P25 (Secondary)
ACM classes: I.2.7; G.3
Cite as: arXiv:2609.31513 [stat.ME]
  (or arXiv:2609.31513v1 [stat.ME] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.31513
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Marco Mandap PhD [view email]
[v1] Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:54:09 UTC (43 KB)
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