<p>We have an ambiguous <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/benchmark" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;benchmark&#39;" rel="tag">benchmark</a> tag that has 23 questions but no usage guidance and seems to be being used for several quite different things.</p>

<p>Some questions are asking about benchmarks for statistical models to be compared against eg  <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/257547/how-to-benchmark-an-acd-model">here</a>. There was a failed <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/166174">edit request</a> suggesting that this should become the recommended usage for the tag:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Refers to a forecasting model which is used as a standard by which a more complected model (i.e VARs and VECM) must out preform. Usually the historical mean, median or some form of an ARIMA class of model is used as a the model which the more complected one must outperform to display the model's effectiveness in comparison.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>But there seem to be rather more questions about benchmarking code runtimes etc eg <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/296723/how-to-best-report-code-benchmarking-results">here</a>.</p>

<p>I have a feeling that the tag should be split into two cases and "benchmark" itself dropped for being potentially ambiguous. But I'm not an expert on either of these two areas.</p>

<p>There are a few threads that do not seem to fit within either of these categories, eg <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/250304/on-which-benchmark-datasets-decision-trees-do-not-perform-well">here</a> (which might be better regarded as a request for a canonical exemplar data set) and <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6538/mathematician-wants-the-equivalent-knowledge-to-a-quality-stats-degree">here</a> (where "benchmark" seems to be referring to educational standards), but these usages seem too rare to require disambiguating and perhaps the tag should simply be removed.</p>
