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Understanding a confusion matrix

Sometimes accuracy doesn't tell the whole story

  • A test for a rare disease can be 99.9% accurate by just guessing "no" all the time.
  • We need to understand true positives and true negative as well as false positives and false negatives.
  • A confusion matrix shows this.

Actual YES Actual NO
Predicted YES True positives False positives
Predicted NO False negatives True negatives