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Your Lopsided Model is Out to Get You

For classification problems I argue one of the biggest steps you can take to improve the quality and utility of your models is to prefer models that return scores or return probabilities instead of classification rules. Doing this also opens a second large opportunity for improvement: working with your domain […]

Surgery on ROC Plots

This note is a little break from our model homotopy series. I have a neat example where one combines two classifiers to get a better classifier using a method I am calling “ROC surgery.” In ROC surgery we look at multiple ROC plots and decide we want to cut out […]

Unrolling the ROC

In our data science teaching, we present the ROC plot (and the area under the curve of the plot, or AUC) as a useful tool for evaluating score-based classifier models, as well as for comparing multiple such models. The ROC is informative and useful, but it’s also perhaps overly concise […]

More on ROC/AUC

A bit more on the ROC/AUC The issue The receiver operating characteristic curve (or ROC) is one of the standard methods to evaluate a scoring system. Nina Zumel has described its application, but I would like to call out some additional details. In my opinion while the ROC is a […]