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Evaluating Classification Models

Dan Fitton takes us through some of the useful techniques and measures for evaluating classification models:

The confusion matrix is perhaps the most important thing to look at when evaluating a classification model. It contains a large amount of insight for such a small sized table. Despite its name, the confusion matrix is actually quite simple. It is a matrix that visualises the count of actual class instances against predicted class instances. This allows you to quickly see the amount of correct and incorrect predictions for each category, and whether any bias exists, and if so, where it is.

The example is specifically around Azure ML, but applies across the board. I think people get a little bit too hung up on accuracy and forget about important measures like positive and negative predictive value.