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Auteur principal: Nikolopoulos, Sotirios D.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00916
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author Nikolopoulos, Sotirios D.
author_facet Nikolopoulos, Sotirios D.
contents Evaluating rare-event forecasts is challenging because standard metrics collapse as event prevalence declines. Measures such as F1-score, AUPRC, MCC, and accuracy induce degenerate thresholds -- converging to zero or one -- and their values become dominated by class imbalance rather than tail discrimination. We develop a family of rare-event-stable (RES) metrics whose optimal thresholds remain strictly interior as the event probability approaches zero, ensuring coherent decision rules under extreme rarity. Simulations spanning event probabilities from 0.01 down to one in a million show that RES metrics maintain stable thresholds, consistent model rankings, and near-complete prevalence invariance, whereas traditional metrics exhibit statistically significant threshold drift and structural collapse. A credit-default application confirms these results: RES metrics yield interpretable probability-of-default cutoffs (4-9%) and remain robust under subsampling, while classical metrics fail operationally. The RES framework provides a principled, prevalence-invariant basis for evaluating extreme-risk forecasts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_00916
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Imbalance-Robust Evaluation Framework for Extreme Risk Forecasts
Nikolopoulos, Sotirios D.
Methodology
Risk Management
Machine Learning
62F99, 62C99
I.5.2; G.3
Evaluating rare-event forecasts is challenging because standard metrics collapse as event prevalence declines. Measures such as F1-score, AUPRC, MCC, and accuracy induce degenerate thresholds -- converging to zero or one -- and their values become dominated by class imbalance rather than tail discrimination. We develop a family of rare-event-stable (RES) metrics whose optimal thresholds remain strictly interior as the event probability approaches zero, ensuring coherent decision rules under extreme rarity. Simulations spanning event probabilities from 0.01 down to one in a million show that RES metrics maintain stable thresholds, consistent model rankings, and near-complete prevalence invariance, whereas traditional metrics exhibit statistically significant threshold drift and structural collapse. A credit-default application confirms these results: RES metrics yield interpretable probability-of-default cutoffs (4-9%) and remain robust under subsampling, while classical metrics fail operationally. The RES framework provides a principled, prevalence-invariant basis for evaluating extreme-risk forecasts.
title An Imbalance-Robust Evaluation Framework for Extreme Risk Forecasts
topic Methodology
Risk Management
Machine Learning
62F99, 62C99
I.5.2; G.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00916