evaluation metrics for text classification


In single-label scenarios, the usual metrics are calculated using the confusion matrix, which is a specific table layout that makes it very easy to see if the classifier is returning the correct label or not and which labels the system is misclassifying. G-mean or F1-score or accuracy is something I am considering and I also saw the framework above for binary classification. Therefore, instead of a simple positive or negative prediction, the score introduces a level of granularity. Page 187, Imbalanced Learning: Foundations, Algorithms, and Applications, 2013. One more q, the dataset we're talking about is the test dataset, right? What if every class is equally important? Read more. Secondly, Im currently dealing with some classification problem, in which a label must be predicted, and I will be paying close attention to positive class. But I could still make incremental improvements (lowering my score) by getting better with my negative class predictions while making little or worsening gains on the positive side. I thought precision is not a metric I should consider. The hmeasure package is intended as a complete solution for classification performance. Metrics based on a probabilistic understanding of error, i.e. Or give me any reference or maybe some reasoning that didnt come to my mind? Sensitivity and Specificity can be combined into a single score that balances both concerns, called the geometric mean or G-Mean. Hi, Although generally effective, the ROC Curve and ROC AUC can be optimistic under a severe class imbalance, especially when the number of examples in the minority class is small. The Brier score is calculated as the mean squared error between the expected probabilities for the positive class (e.g. Are there other metrics that evaluate to per class bases? Thanks for the suggestion. ROC is an acronym that means Receiver Operating Characteristic and summarizes a field of study for analyzing binary classifiers based on their ability to discriminate classes. It should say in the top left of the plot. For a model that predicts real numbers (e.g. It my recommendation. For me, its very important to generate as little False Negatives as possible. very useful article. https://machinelearningmastery.com/roc-curves-and-precision-recall-curves-for-classification-in-python/, And this: 2. larger difference is more error). As such performance metrics may be needed that focus on the minority class, which is made challenging because it is the minority class where we lack observations required to train an effective model. https://machinelearningmastery.com/cross-entropy-for-machine-learning/, The benefit of the Brier score is that it is focused on the positive class, which for imbalanced classification is the minority class.. Is there such a thing as stratified extraction like in classification models? Attempting to optimize more than one metric will lead to confusion. In this case, the focus on the minority class makes the Precision-Recall AUC more useful for imbalanced classification problems. However, in real world often it is not sufficient to talk about a text belonging to a single category. Also, perhaps talk to the people that are interested in the model and ask what metric would be helpful to them to understand model performance. This section provides more resources on the topic if you are looking to go deeper. I am just asking because I cant figure out where would these performance metrics fit in the graph above. Also, could you please clarify your point regarding the CV and pipeline, as i didnt get it 100%. Hi Mr. Jason, But when I plotted the frequency distribution predicted probabilities of **positive class** the above patterns are observed for model#1, Model #2. I have a model for imbalanced data and tested it on large variants of datasets with different class distributions (distributions from [0.5,0.5] to [0.95,0.05]). Hi Jason. The confusion matrix allows to calculate the number of true positives (TP, correctly returned labels), false positives (FP, the classifier returns a label that is incorrect), true negatives (TN, correctly non-returned labels) and false negatives (FN, the classifier does not return a label which should have returned). MeaningCloud is a trademark by MeaningCloud LLC, Performance Metrics for Text Categorization. Precision and recall can be combined into a single score that seeks to balance both concerns, called the F-score or the F-measure. How to match the objective and metric functions? https://machinelearningmastery.com/smote-oversampling-for-imbalanced-classification/. https://machinelearningmastery.com/roc-curves-and-precision-recall-curves-for-imbalanced-classification/, I just want to know which references make you conclude this statement If we want to predict label and both classes are equally important and we have < 80%-90% for the Majority Class, then we can use accuracy score". Can we treat imbalanced dataset as balanced (by applying techniques such as SMOTE) and then apply evaluation metrics? Here, important means paramount (more important than anything else; supreme), e.g. Great as always. It has been quite useful and awesome theories from your articles! For example, reporting classification accuracy for a severely imbalanced classification problem could be dangerously misleading. When do I use those? About the challenge of choosing metrics for classification, and how it is particularly difficult when there is a skewed class distribution. Here is an extract from the R package implementing it. Firstly, because most of the standard metrics that are widely used assume a balanced class distribution, and because typically not all classes, and therefore, not all prediction errors, are equal for imbalanced classification. Jason Im still struggling a bit with Brier score. If I predict a probability of being in the positive class of 0.1 and the instance is in the negative (majority) class (label = 0), Id take a 0.1^2 hit. Given that choosing an evaluation metric is so important and there are tens or perhaps hundreds of metrics to choose from, what are you supposed to do? Generally, you must choose a metric that best captures what is important about predictions. Our dataset is imbalanced (1 to 10 ratio), so i need advice on the below: 1- We should do the cleaning, pre-processing, and feature engineering on the training dataset first before we proceed to adopt any sampling technique, correct? Since we want to rank, I concluded probabilities and thus we should look at the Brier score. How to choose a metric for imbalanced classification if you dont know where to start. Specificity is the complement to sensitivity, or the true negative rate, and summarises how well the negative class was predicted. Ranking metrics dont make any assumptions about class distributions. The F-Measure is a popular metric for imbalanced classification. Recall summarizes how well the positive class was predicted and is the same calculation as sensitivity. In fact, the use of common metrics in imbalanced domains can lead to sub-optimal classification models and might produce misleading conclusions since these measures are insensitive to skewed domains. This scenario is called multi-label categorization, and the task is to associate each text with a subset of categories Y from a set of disjoint labels L where YL (Y is a subset of L). The reason is, a high accuracy (or low error) is achievable by a no skill model that only predicts the majority class. For two classes equally important consider accuracy or ROC AUC. The Imbalanced Classification EBook is where you'll find the Really Good stuff. Head of Innovation at @MeaningCloud: natural language processing, semantics, voice of the customer, text analytics, intelligent robotic process automation. However, in multi-label problems, predictions for an instance is a set of labels, and therefore, the concept of fully correct vs partially correct solution can be considered. An important disadvantage of all the threshold metrics discussed in the previous section is that they assume full knowledge of the conditions under which the classifier will be deployed. There are many metrics based on these figures, but the most common are precision and recall (also called sensitivity): There is an inverse relationship between precision and recall, and typically when quality (precision) is increased, quantity (recall) decreases, and the other way round. 2022 Machine Learning Mastery. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Hi Jason Technology enthusiast. Researcher and lecturer at @UC3M, in love with teaching and knowledge sharing. Instead, based on the granularity and coverage of the set of labels, a text intrinsically needs to be assigned with more than one category, for instance, a newspaper article about the climate change may be associated with environment and also with pollution, politics, etc. I'm Jason Brownlee PhD Disclaimer | . Sitemap | Another popular score for predicted probabilities is the Brier score. Hi Jason, thanks a lot for your fast response. If calculations of true/false positives/negatives are done directly, globally, independently of the label, they are called macro-averaged metrics. consider a classifier that gives a numeric score for an instance to be classified in the positive class. This is the result of my test set: As you can see I have 1835 data points from class1 and 86657 from class2. Do you mean performing the metrics in a 1vs1 approach for all possibilities? Your email address will not be published. The confusion matrix provides more insight into not only the performance of a predictive model but also which classes are being predicted correctly, which incorrectly, and what type of errors are being made. Naively I would say LogLoss is the one which is focused on the positive class and not Brier score, as because when y=1, then the term: LogLoss = -((1 y) * log(1 yhat) + y * log(yhat)). Again, different thresholds are used on a set of predictions by a model, and in this case, the precision and recall are calculated. Sensitivity refers to the true positive rate and summarizes how well the positive class was predicted. Keep up the great work! Im proud of the metric selection tree, took some work to put it together. Thanks a lot Jason, this is a fantastic summary! A perfect classifier has a log loss of 0.0, with worse values being positive up to infinity. And the complement of classification accuracy called classification error. You can see examples here: Shantanu Godbole and Sunita Sarawagi, in their paper Discriminative methods for multi-labeled classification, published in Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2004, pp 22-30), proposed the label-based accuracy (LBA), which symmetrically measures how close S is to T, and it is nowadays the most popular multi-label accuracy measure: LBA is in fact a combined metric of precision and recall, as it takes into account both FP (categories in S that should not be assigned) but also FN (categories missing in S). There are standard metrics that are widely used for evaluating classification predictive models, such as classification accuracy or classification error. This post gives answer to this question describing the metrics that we commonly adopt for model quality assessment, depending on the categorization scenario that we are facing. Difference well described here: I should get my data ready first and then test different sampling methods and see what works best, right? You can test what happens to the metric if a model predicts all the majority class, all the minority class, does well, does poorly, and so on. Its just a guide. Many nonlinear classifiers are not trained under a probabilistic framework and therefore require their probabilities to be calibrated against a dataset prior to being evaluated via a probabilistic metric. For more on ROC curves and precision-recall curves for imbalanced classification, see the tutorial: Probabilistic metrics are designed specifically to quantify the uncertainty in a classifiers predictions. I follow you and really like your posts. I have balanced the dataset using resampling. Experiments are performed with different models and the outcome of each experiment is quantified with a metric. A perfect model will be a point in the top right of the plot. Note: The Y axis for the first plot is in 1000s and the Y axis for the second plot is in 100s. I have been reading your articles and working on my research. Before applying all the metric do we have to balance the dataset using techniques like upsampling, smot etc ? https://machinelearningmastery.com/roc-curves-and-precision-recall-curves-for-imbalanced-classification/. This can often be insightful, but be warned that some fields of study may fall into groupthink and adopt a metric that might be excellent for comparing large numbers of models at scale, but terrible for model selection in practice. As this is a harsh metric, to capture the notion of partially correct, we need to evaluate the difference between the predicted labels (S) and the true labels (T). Ok another question. Hi Jason, Thanks for the detailed explanation. An alternative to the ROC Curve is the precision-recall curve that can be used in a similar way, although focuses on the performance of the classifier on the minority class. You must choose a metric that best captures what is important to you and project stakeholders. For example, I know scikit-learn provides the classification_report function that computes the precision/recall/f1 for each class. In order to get a handle on the metrics that you could choose from, we will use a taxonomy proposed by Cesar Ferri, et al. A Survey of Predictive Modelling under Imbalanced Distributions, 2015. (There are 2 maj.(50%, 40%) and 1 min. For more on precision, recall and F-measure for imbalanced classification, see the tutorial: These are probably the most popular metrics to consider, although many others do exist. I have a question regarding the effect of noisy labels percentage (for example we know that we have around 15% wrong ground truth labels in the dataset) on the maximum achievable precision and recall in binary classification problems? Selecting a model, and even the data preparation methods together are a search problem that is guided by the evaluation metric. A perfect classifier has a Brier score of 0.0. Classification Of Imbalanced Data: A Review, 2009. What do you mean, can you please elaborate? Ive been working on imbalanced data for a while and this post has helped me several times. Search, | Positive Prediction | Negative Prediction, Positive Class | True Positive (TP)| False Negative (FN), Negative Class | False Positive (FP) | True Negative (TN), Making developers awesome at machine learning, Undersampling Algorithms for Imbalanced Classification, Best Resources for Imbalanced Classification, SMOTE for Imbalanced Classification with Python, A Gentle Introduction to Imbalanced Classification, Imbalanced Classification With Python (7-Day Mini-Course), Step-By-Step Framework for Imbalanced Classification, Click to Take the FREE Imbalanced Classification Crash-Course, Classification Of Imbalanced Data: A Review, Imbalanced Learning: Foundations, Algorithms, and Applications, A Survey of Predictive Modelling under Imbalanced Distributions, An Experimental Comparison Of Performance Measures For Classification, Failure of Classification Accuracy for Imbalanced Class Distributions, How to Calculate Precision, Recall, and F-Measure for Imbalanced Classification, ROC Curves and Precision-Recall Curves for Imbalanced Classification, A Gentle Introduction to Probability Metrics for Imbalanced Classification, Chapter 3 Performance Measures, Learning from Imbalanced Data Sets, Receiver operating characteristic, Wikipedia, https://machinelearningmastery.com/cross-entropy-for-machine-learning/, https://machinelearningmastery.com/framework-for-imbalanced-classification-projects/, https://machinelearningmastery.com/roc-curves-and-precision-recall-curves-for-classification-in-python/, https://machinelearningmastery.com/roc-curves-and-precision-recall-curves-for-imbalanced-classification/, https://community.tibco.com/wiki/gains-vs-roc-curves-do-you-understand-difference#:~:text=The%20Gains%20chart%20is%20the,found%20in%20the%20targeted%20sample, https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.precision_score.html, https://machinelearningmastery.com/precision-recall-and-f-measure-for-imbalanced-classification/, https://machinelearningmastery.com/tour-of-evaluation-metrics-for-imbalanced-classification/, https://machinelearningmastery.com/smote-oversampling-for-imbalanced-classification/, A Gentle Introduction to Threshold-Moving for Imbalanced Classification, One-Class Classification Algorithms for Imbalanced Datasets, Random Oversampling and Undersampling for Imbalanced Classification.