Last Updated on January 14, 2020 Classification accuracy is a metric that summarizes the performance of a classification model as the number of correct predictions divided by the total number of predictions. It is easy to calculate and intuitive to understand, making it the most common metric used for evaluating classifier models. This intuition breaks down when the distribution of examples to classes is severely skewed. Intuitions developed by practitioners on balanced datasets, such as 99 percent representing a skillful […]

Last Updated on August 2, 2020 Classification accuracy is the total number of correct predictions divided by the total number of predictions made for a dataset. As a performance measure, accuracy is inappropriate for imbalanced classification problems. The main reason is that the overwhelming number of examples from the majority class (or classes) will overwhelm the number of examples in the minority class, meaning that even unskillful models can achieve accuracy scores of 90 percent, or 99 percent, depending on […]

Last Updated on September 16, 2020 Most imbalanced classification problems involve two classes: a negative case with the majority of examples and a positive case with a minority of examples. Two diagnostic tools that help in the interpretation of binary (two-class) classification predictive models are ROC Curves and Precision-Recall curves. Plots from the curves can be created and used to understand the trade-off in performance for different threshold values when interpreting probabilistic predictions. Each plot can also be summarized with […]

Last Updated on January 14, 2020 A classifier is only as good as the metric used to evaluate it. If you choose the wrong metric to evaluate your models, you are likely to choose a poor model, or in the worst case, be misled about the expected performance of your model. Choosing an appropriate metric is challenging generally in applied machine learning, but is particularly difficult for imbalanced classification problems. Firstly, because most of the standard metrics that are widely […]

Last Updated on January 14, 2020 Classification predictive modeling involves predicting a class label for examples, although some problems require the prediction of a probability of class membership. For these problems, the crisp class labels are not required, and instead, the likelihood that each example belonging to each class is required and later interpreted. As such, small relative probabilities can carry a lot of meaning and specialized metrics are required to quantify the predicted probabilities. In this tutorial, you will […]

Last Updated on July 31, 2020 Model evaluation involves using the available dataset to fit a model and estimate its performance when making predictions on unseen examples. It is a challenging problem as both the training dataset used to fit the model and the test set used to evaluate it must be sufficiently large and representative of the underlying problem so that the resulting estimate of model performance is not too optimistic or pessimistic. The two most common approaches used […]

Last Updated on August 27, 2020 A common mistake made by beginners is to apply machine learning algorithms to a problem without establishing a performance baseline. A performance baseline provides a minimum score above which a model is considered to have skill on the dataset. It also provides a point of relative improvement for all models evaluated on the dataset. A baseline can be established using a naive classifier, such as predicting one class label for all examples in the […]

Last Updated on August 28, 2020 Imbalanced datasets are those where there is a severe skew in the class distribution, such as 1:100 or 1:1000 examples in the minority class to the majority class. This bias in the training dataset can influence many machine learning algorithms, leading some to ignore the minority class entirely. This is a problem as it is typically the minority class on which predictions are most important. One approach to addressing the problem of class imbalance […]

Last Updated on August 18, 2020 Imbalanced Classification Crash Course.Get on top of imbalanced classification in 7 days. Classification predictive modeling is the task of assigning a label to an example. Imbalanced classification are those classification tasks where the distribution of examples across the classes is not equal. Practical imbalanced classification requires the use of a suite of specialized techniques, data preparation techniques, learning algorithms, and performance metrics. In this crash course, you will discover how you can get started […]

Last Updated on August 21, 2020 Imbalanced classification involves developing predictive models on classification datasets that have a severe class imbalance. The challenge of working with imbalanced datasets is that most machine learning techniques will ignore, and in turn have poor performance on, the minority class, although typically it is performance on the minority class that is most important. One approach to addressing imbalanced datasets is to oversample the minority class. The simplest approach involves duplicating examples in the minority […]