Summary

In this chapter, we finished the initial exploration of the case study data by examining the response variable. Once we became confident in the completeness and correctness of the dataset, we were prepared to explore the relation between features and response and build models.

We spent much of this chapter getting used to model fitting in scikit-learn at the technical, coding level, and learning about metrics we could use with the binary classification problem of the case study. When trying different feature sets and different kinds of models, you will need some way to tell if one approach is working better than another. Consequently, you'll need to use model performance metrics like those we learned in this chapter.

While accuracy is a familiar and intuitive metric as the percentage of correct classifications, we learned why it may not give a useful assessment of the performance of a classifier. We learned how to use a majority-class null model to tell whether an accuracy rate is truly good, or no better than what would result from simply predicting the most common class for all samples. When the data is imbalanced, accuracy is usually not the best way to judge a classifier.

In order to have a more nuanced view of how a model is performing, it's necessary to separate the positive and negative classes and assess the accuracy of them independently. From the resulting counts of true and false positive and negative classifications, which can be summarized in a confusion matrix, we can derive several other metrics: true and false positive and negative rates. Combining true and false positives and negatives with the concept of predicted probabilities and a variable threshold of prediction, we can further characterize the usefulness of a classifier using the ROC curve, the precision-recall curve, and the areas under these curves.

With these tools, you are well equipped to answer general questions about the performance of a binary classifier in any domain you may be working in. Later in the book, we will learn about application-specific ways to assess model performance by attaching costs and benefits to true and false positives and negatives. Before that, starting in the next chapter, we will begin learning the details behind what is possibly the most popular and simplest classification model: logistic regression.