TheInfoList

Sources: Fawcett (2006),[1] Powers (2011),[2] Ting (2011),[3], CAWCR[4] D. Chicco & G. Jurman (2020),[5] Tharwat (2018).[6]

ROC curve of three predictors of peptide cleaving in the proteasome.

A receiver operating characteristic curve, or ROC curve, is a graphical plot that illustrates the diagnostic ability of a binary classifier system as its discrimination threshold is varied. The method was originally developed for operators of military radar receivers, which is why it is so named.

The ROC curve is created by plotting the true positive rate (TPR) against the false positive rate (FPR) at various threshold settings. The true-positive rate is also known as sensitivity, recall or probability of detection[7] in machine learning. The false-positive rate is also known as probability of false alarm[7] and can be calculated as (1 − specificity). It can also be thought of as a plot of the power as a function of the Type I Error of the decision rule (when the performance is calculated from just a sample of the population, it can be thought of as estimators of these quantities). The ROC curve is thus the sensitivity or recall as a function of fall-out. In general, if the probability distributions for both detection and false alarm are known, the ROC curve can be generated by plotting the cumulative distribution function (area under the probability distribution from ${\displaystyle -\infty }$ to the discrimination threshold) of the detection probability in the y-axis versus the cumulative distribution function of the false-alarm probability on the x-axis.

ROC analysis provides tools to select possibly optimal models and to discard suboptimal ones independently from (and prior to specifying) the cost context or the class distribution. ROC analysis is related in a direct and natural way to cost/benefit analysis of diagnostic decision making.

The ROC curve was first developed by electrical engineers and radar engineers during World War II for detecting enemy objects in battlefields and was soon introduced to psychology to account for perceptual detection of stimuli. ROC analysis since then has been used in medicine, radiology, biometrics, forecasting of natural hazards,[8] meteorology,[9] model performance assessment,[10] and other areas for many decades and is increasingly used in machine learning and data mining research.

The ROC is also known as a relative operating characteristic curve, because it is a comparison of two operating characteristics (TPR and FPR) as the criterion changes.[11]

## Basic concept

A classification model (classifier or diagnosis) is a mapping of instances between certain classes/groups. Because the classifier or diagnosis result can be an arbitrary real value (continuous output), the classifier boundary between classes must be determined by a threshold value (for instance, to determine whether a person has hypertension based on a blood pressure measure). Or it can be a discrete class label, indicating one of the classes.

Consider a two-class prediction problem (binary classification), in which the outcomes are labeled either as positive (p) or negative (n). There are four possible outcomes from a binary classifier. If the outcome from a prediction is p and the actual value is also p, then it is called a true positive (TP); however if the actual value is n then it is said to be a false positive (FP). Conversely, a true negative (TN) has occurred when both the prediction outcome and the actual value are n, and false negative (FN) is when the prediction outcome is n while the actual value is p.

To get an appropriate example in a real-world problem, consider a diagnostic test that seeks to determine whether a person has a certain disease. A false positive in this case occurs when the person tests positive, but does not actually have the disease. A false negative, on the other hand, occurs when the person tests negative, suggesting they are healthy, when they actually do have the disease.

Let us define an experiment from P positive instances and N negative instances for some condition. The four outcomes can be formulated in a 2×2 contingency table or confusion matrix, as follows:

TPR = 0.63 TPR = 0.77 TPR = 0.24 TPR = 0.76 FPR = 0.28 FPR = 0.77 FPR = 0.88 FPR = 0.12 PPV = 0.69 PPV = 0.50 PPV = 0.21 PPV = 0.86 F1 = 0.66 F1 = 0.61 F1 = 0.23 F1 = 0.81 ACC = 0.68 ACC = 0.50 ACC = 0.18 ACC = 0.82

Plots of the four results above in the ROC space are given in the figure. The result of method A clearly shows the best predictive power among A, B, and C. The result of B lies on the random guess line (the diagonal line), and it can be seen in the table that the accuracy of B is 50%. However, when C is mirrored across the center point (0.5,0.5), the resulting method C′ is even better than A. This mirrored method simply reverses the predictions of whatever method or test produced the C contingency table. Although the original C method has negative predictive power, simply reversing its decisions leads to a new predictive method C′ which has positive predictive power. When the C method predicts p or n, the C′ method would predict n or p, respectively. In this manner, the C′ test would perform the best. The closer a result from a contingency table is to the upper left corner, the better it predicts, but the distance from the random guess line in either direction is the best indicator of how much predictive power a method has. If the result is below the line (i.e. the method is worse than a random guess), all of the method's predictions must be reversed in order to utilize its power, thereby moving the result above the random guess line.

## Curves in ROC space

In binary classification, the class prediction for each instance is often made based on a continuous random variable ${\displaystyle X}$, which is a "score" computed for the instance (e.g. the estimated probability in logistic regression). Given a threshold parameter ${\displaystyle T}$, the instance is classified as "positive" if ${\displaystyle X>T}$, and "negative" otherwise. ${\displaystyle X}$ follows a probability density ${\displaystyle f_{1}(x)}$ if the instance actually belongs to class "positive", and ${\displaystyle f_{0}(x)}$ if otherwise. Therefore, the true positive rate is given by ${\displaystyle {\mbox{TPR}}(T)=\int _{T}^{\infty }f_{1}(x)\,dx}$ and the false positive rate is given by

The best possible prediction method would yield a point in the upper left corner or coordinate (0,1) of the ROC space, representing 100% sensitivity (no false negatives) and 100% specificity (no false positives). The (0,1) point is also called a perfect classification. A random guess would give a point along a diagonal line (the so-called line of no-discrimination) from the left bottom to the top right corners (regardless of the positive and negative base rates). An intuitive example of random guessing is a decision by flipping coins. As the size of the sample increases, a random classifier's ROC point tends towards the diagonal line. In the case of a balanced coin, it will tend to the point (0.5, 0.5).

The diagonal divides the ROC space. Points above the diagonal represent good classification results (better than random); points below the line represent bad results (worse than random). Note that the output of a consistently bad predictor could simply be inverted to obtain a good predictor.

Let us look into four prediction results from 100 positive and 100 negative instances:

Plots of the four results above in the ROC space are given in the figure. The result of method A clearly shows the best predictive power among A, B, and C. The result of B lies on the random guess line (the diagonal line), and it can be seen in the table that the accuracy of B is 50%. However, when C is mirrored across the center point (0.5,0.5), the resulting method C′ is even better than A. This mirrored method simply reverses the predictions of whatever method or test produced the C contingency table. Although the original C method has negative predictive power, simply reversing its decisions leads to a new predictive method C′ which has positive predictive power. When the C method predicts p or n, the C′ method would predict n or p, respectively. In this manner, the C′ test would perform the best. The closer a result from a contingency table is to the upper left corner, the better it predicts, but the distance from the random guess line in either direction is the best indicator of how much predictive power a method has. If the result is below the line (i.e. the method is worse than a random guess), all of the method's predictions must be reversed in order to utilize its power, thereby moving the result above the random guess line.

## Curves in ROC space

In binary classification, the class prediction for each instance is often made based on a continuous random variable ${\displaystyle X}$, which is a "score" computed for the instance (e.g. the estimated probability in logistic regression). Given a threshold parameter ${\displaystyle T}$In binary classification, the class prediction for each instance is often made based on a continuous random variable ${\displaystyle X}$, which is a "score" computed for the instance (e.g. the estimated probability in logistic regression). Given a threshold parameter ${\displaystyle T}$, the instance is classified as "positive" if ${\displaystyle X>T}$, and "negative" otherwise. ${\displaystyle X}$ follows a probability density ${\displaystyle f_{1}(x)}$ if the instance actually belongs to class "positive", and ${\displaystyle f_{0}(x)}$ if otherwise. Therefore, the true positive rate is given by ${\displaystyle {\mbox{TPR}}(T)=\int _{T}^{\infty }f_{1}(x)\,dx}$ and the false positive rate is given by ${\displaystyle {\mbox{FPR}}(T)=\int _{T}^{\infty }f_{0}(x)\,dx}$. The ROC curve plots parametrically TPR(T) versus FPR(T) with T as the varying parameter.

For example, imagine that the blood protein levels in diseased people and healthy people are normally distributed with means of 2 g/dL and 1 g/dL respectively. A medical test might measure the level of a certain protein in a blood sample and classify any number above a certain threshold as indicating disease. The experimenter can adjust the threshold (black vertical line in the figure), which will in turn change the false positive rate. Increasing the threshold would result in fewer false positives (and more false negatives), corresponding to a leftward movement on the curve. The actual shape of the curve is determined by how much overlap the two distributions have.

## Further interpretations

When using normalized units, the area under the curve (often referred to as simply the AUC) is equal to the probability that a classifier will rank a randomly chosen positive instance higher than a randomly chosen negative one (assuming 'positive' ranks higher than 'negative').[15] This can be seen as follows: the area under the curve is given by (the integral boundaries are reversed as large T has a lower value on the x-axis)

${\displaystyle TPR(T):T\rightarrow y(x)}$