Balanced Accuracy

We can denote the probability of a true (in-class) instances scoring higher than a false (not in class) instance (with 1/2 point for ties) as Prob[score(true)>score(false)] (with half point on ties). We can confirm Prob[score(true)>score(false)] (with half point on ties) == BalancedAccuracy for hard or decision classifiers by defining score(true)>score(false) as:

A D : True Positive and True Negative: Correct sorting 1 point
A B : True Positive and False Positive (same prediction "Positive", different outcomes): 1/2 point
C D : False Negative and True Negative (same prediction "Negative", different outcomes): 1/2 point
C B : False Negative and True Negative: Wrong order 0 points

Then ScoreTrueGTFalse ==Prob[score(true)>score(false)]` is:

ScoreTrueGTFalse = (1*A*D  + 0.5*A*B + 0.5*C*D + 0*C*B)/((A+C)*(B+D))

Which we can confirm is equal to balanced accuracy.

sympy(paste("simplify(",ScoreTrueGTFalse-BalancedAccuracy,")"))
## [1] "0"

AUC

We can also confirm Prob[score(true)>score(false)] (with half point on ties) == AUC. We can compute the AUC (the area under the drawn curve) of the above confusion matrix by referring to the following diagram.

ComputingArea

Then we can check for general equality:

AUC = (1/2)*FPR*TPR + (1/2)*(1-FPR)*(1-TPR) + (1-FPR)*TPR
sympy(paste("simplify(",ScoreTrueGTFalse-AUC,")"))
## [1] "0"

This AUC score (with half point credit on ties) equivalence holds in general (see also More on ROC/AUC, though I got this wrong the first time).

F1

We can show F1 is different than Balanced Accuracy by plotting results they differ on:

# Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score
F1 = 2*Precision*Recall/(Precision+Recall)
F1 = sympy(paste("simplify(",F1,")"))
print(F1)
## [1] "2*TruePositives/(FalseNegatives + FalsePositives + 2*TruePositives)"
print(BalancedAccuracy)
## [1] "TrueNegatives/(2*(FalsePositives + TrueNegatives)) + TruePositives/(2*(FalseNegatives + TruePositives))"
# Show F1 and BalancedAccuracy do not always vary together (even for hard classifiers)
F1formula = parse(text=F1)
BAformula = parse(text=BalancedAccuracy)
frm = c()
for(TotTrue in 1:5) {
  for(TotFalse in 1:5) {
    for(TruePositives in 0:TotTrue) {
      for(TrueNegatives in 0:TotFalse) {
        FalsePositives = TotFalse-TrueNegatives
        FalseNegatives = TotTrue-TruePositives
        F1a <- sub(F1formula,
                   TruePositives=TruePositives,FalsePositives=FalsePositives,
                   FalseNegatives=FalseNegatives,TrueNegatives=TrueNegatives)
        BAa <- sub(BAformula,
                   TruePositives=TruePositives,FalsePositives=FalsePositives,
                   FalseNegatives=FalseNegatives,TrueNegatives=TrueNegatives)
        if((F1a<=0)&&(BAa>0.5)) {
          stop()
        }
        fi = data.frame(
          TotTrue=TotTrue,
          TotFalse=TotFalse,
          TruePositives=TruePositives,FalsePositives=FalsePositives,
          FalseNegatives=FalseNegatives,TrueNegatives=TrueNegatives,
          F1=F1a,BalancedAccuracy=BAa,
          stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
        frm = rbind(frm,fi) # bad n^2 accumulation
      }
    }
  }
}

ggplot(data=frm,aes(x=F1,y=BalancedAccuracy)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  ggtitle("F1 versus balancedAccuarcy/AUC")

Baroque measures

In various sciences over the years over 20 measures of “scoring correspondence” have been introduced by playing games with publication priority, symmetry, and incorporating significance (“chance adjustments”) directly into the measure.

Each measure presumably exists because it avoids flaws of all of the others. However the sheer number of them (in my opinion) triggers what I call “De Morgan’s objection”:

If I had before me a fly and an elephant, having never seen more than one such magnitude of either kind; and if the fly were to endeavor to persuade me that he was larger than the elephant, I might by possibility be placed in a difficulty. The apparently little creature might use such arguments about the effect of distance, and might appeal to such laws of sight and hearing as I, if unlearned in those things, might be unable wholly to reject. But if there were a thousand flies, all buzzing, to appearance, about the great creature; and, to a fly, declaring, each one for himself, that he was bigger than the quadruped; and all giving different and frequently contradictory reasons; and each one despising and opposing the reasons of the others—I should feel quite at my ease. I should certainly say, My little friends, the case of each one of you is destroyed by the rest.

(Augustus De Morgan, “A Budget of Paradoxes” 1872)

There is actually an excellent literature stream investigating which of these measures are roughly equivalent (say arbitrary monotone functions of each other) and which are different (leave aside which are even useful).

Two excellent guides to this rat hole include:

• Ackerman, M., & Ben-David, S. (2008). “Measures of clustering quality: A working set of axioms for clustering.”" Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference.

• Warrens, M. (2008). “On similarity coefficients for 2× 2 tables and correction for chance.” Psychometrika, 73(3), 487–502.

The point is: you not only can get a publication trying to sort this mess, you can actually do truly interesting work trying to relate these measures.

Further directions

One can take finding relations and invariants much further as in “Lectures on Algebraic Statistics” Mathias Drton, Bernd Sturmfels, Seth Sullivant, 2008.

Conclusion

It is a bit much to hope to only need to know “one best measure” or to claim to be familiar (let alone expert) in all plausible measures. Instead, find a few common evaluation measures that work well and stick with them.