Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Analysis

Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Analysis

Nicolas Lachiche (University of Strasbourg, France)
Copyright: © 2009 |Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-010-3.ch255

Abstract

Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC curves) have been used for years in decision making from signals, such as radar or radiology. Basically they plot the hit rate versus the false alarm rate. They were introduced recently in data mining and machine learning to take into account different misclassification costs, or to deal with skewed class distributions. In particular they help to adapt the extracted model when the training set characteristics differ from the evaluation data. Overall they provide a convenient way to compare classifiers, but also an unexpected way to build better classifiers.
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Background

ROC analysis mainly deals with binary classifiers, models associating each entry to the positive or to the negative class. The performance of a given classifier is collected in a confusion matrix (also known as a contingency table) counting the number of training examples in each of the four cells depending on their actual classes and on their predicted classes (see Table 1).

Table 1.
        Real Positive        Real Negative
        Predicted Positive        True Positive (TP)
        aka Hit		        False Positive (FP)
        aka False Alarm
        aka Type I Error
        Predicted Negative        False Negative (FN)
        aka Miss
        aka Type II Error		        True Negative (TN)
        aka Correct Rejection
        Total Number of Positive (P)        Total Number of Negative (N)

The True Positive Rate (TPR) is the fraction of positive examples correctly classified, TP/P and the False Positive Rate (FPR) is the fraction of negative examples incorrectly classified, FP/N.

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