OFFLINE EVALUATION OF RANKING FUNCTIONS

The claimed subject matter includes techniques for offline evaluation of ranking functions. An example system includes a first module configured to receive production log data, the first module to pre-process the production log data to generate an exploration data set. The example system also includes a second module configured to perform offline estimation of online metrics for ranking functions using the exploration data set. The example system also includes a third module to evaluate a proposed ranking function by comparing the estimated online metrics to a set of baseline metrics of a baseline ranking function and detecting that the estimated online metrics of the proposed ranking function exceed, are lower than, or are within a predetermined range of the baseline metrics.