Confidence Intervals for Evaluation of Data Mining

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Yuan, Zheng, Jiang, Wenxin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Yuan, Zheng
Jiang, Wenxin
author_facet Yuan, Zheng
Jiang, Wenxin
contents In data mining, when binary prediction rules are used to predict a binary outcome, many performance measures are used in a vast array of literature for the purposes of evaluation and comparison. Some examples include classification accuracy, precision, recall, F measures, and Jaccard index. Typically, these performance measures are only approximately estimated from a finite dataset, which may lead to findings that are not statistically significant. In order to properly quantify such statistical uncertainty, it is important to provide confidence intervals associated with these estimated performance measures. We consider statistical inference about general performance measures used in data mining, with both individual and joint confidence intervals. These confidence intervals are based on asymptotic normal approximations and can be computed fast, without needs to do bootstrap resampling. We study the finite sample coverage probabilities for these confidence intervals and also propose a `blurring correction' on the variance to improve the finite sample performance. This 'blurring correction' generalizes the plus-four method from binomial proportion to general performance measures used in data mining. Our framework allows multiple performance measures of multiple classification rules to be inferred simultaneously for comparisons.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07016
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Confidence Intervals for Evaluation of Data Mining
Yuan, Zheng
Jiang, Wenxin
Machine Learning
In data mining, when binary prediction rules are used to predict a binary outcome, many performance measures are used in a vast array of literature for the purposes of evaluation and comparison. Some examples include classification accuracy, precision, recall, F measures, and Jaccard index. Typically, these performance measures are only approximately estimated from a finite dataset, which may lead to findings that are not statistically significant. In order to properly quantify such statistical uncertainty, it is important to provide confidence intervals associated with these estimated performance measures. We consider statistical inference about general performance measures used in data mining, with both individual and joint confidence intervals. These confidence intervals are based on asymptotic normal approximations and can be computed fast, without needs to do bootstrap resampling. We study the finite sample coverage probabilities for these confidence intervals and also propose a `blurring correction' on the variance to improve the finite sample performance. This 'blurring correction' generalizes the plus-four method from binomial proportion to general performance measures used in data mining. Our framework allows multiple performance measures of multiple classification rules to be inferred simultaneously for comparisons.
title Confidence Intervals for Evaluation of Data Mining
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07016