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How would you differentiate between precision and recall in the field of data analysis? Can you think of any scenarios where one of these metrics may be more relevant than the other?

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Answers

Anonymous

6 months ago
4.4Exceptional
Precision and recall are two important evaluation metrics used in the field of data analysis, especially in classification problems. They provide different perspectives on the performance of a model, particularly when dealing with imbalanced datasets or tasks where misclassification costs are unequal.

Definitions:

  • Precision: Precision measures the accuracy of the positive predictions made by the model. It is the ratio of correctly predicted positive instances to the total instances predicted as positive.Precision=True Positives (TP)True Positives (TP)+False Positives (FP)\text{Precision} = \frac{\text{True Positives (TP)}}{\text{True Positives (TP)} + \text{False Positives (FP)}}Precision=True Positives (TP)+False Positives (FP)True Positives (TP) In simpler terms: Out of all the predictions where the model predicted positive (or relevant), how many were actually positive (or relevant).
  • Recall: Recall (also known as sensitivity or true positive rate) measures the ability of the model to identify all relevant (positive) instances. It is the ratio of correctly predicted positive instances to the actual total number of positive instances.Recall=True Positives (TP)True Positives (TP)+False Negatives (FN)\text{Recall} = \frac{\text{True Positives (TP)}}{\text{True Positives (TP)} + \text{False Negatives (FN)}}Recall=True Positives (TP)+False Negatives (FN)True Positives (TP) In simpler terms: Out of all actual positive instances, how many were correctly predicted as positive.

Key Difference:

  • Precision focuses on the quality of positive predictions: "When the model says something is positive, how often is it right?"
  • Recall focuses on the quantity of positive instances correctly identified: "Out of all the actual positives, how many did the model find?"

Example Scenario:

Consider a spam detection system in email filtering:
  • Precision would measure the proportion of emails identified as spam that are actually spam.
  • Recall would measure the proportion of actual spam emails that were correctly identified by the model.

When is Precision more important?

Precision is crucial when the cost of false positives is high. In scenarios where it is important to minimize false alarms or avoid labeling non-releva
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Interview question asked to Machine Learning Engineers interviewing at Walmart, Google, Digit and others: How would you differentiate between precision and recall in the field of data analysis? Can you think of any scenarios where one of these metrics may be more relevant than the other?.