A systematic analysis of performance measures for classification tasks

  • Authors:
  • Marina Sokolova;Guy Lapalme

  • Affiliations:
  • Electronic Health Information Lab, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Ottawa, Canada;Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper presents a systematic analysis of twenty four performance measures used in the complete spectrum of Machine Learning classification tasks, i.e., binary, multi-class, multi-labelled, and hierarchical. For each classification task, the study relates a set of changes in a confusion matrix to specific characteristics of data. Then the analysis concentrates on the type of changes to a confusion matrix that do not change a measure, therefore, preserve a classifier's evaluation (measure invariance). The result is the measure invariance taxonomy with respect to all relevant label distribution changes in a classification problem. This formal analysis is supported by examples of applications where invariance properties of measures lead to a more reliable evaluation of classifiers. Text classification supplements the discussion with several case studies.