Classification Performance Metric for Imbalance Data Based on Recall and Selectivity Normalized in Class Labels

Robert Burduk

Published 2020-06-23Version 1

In the classification of a class imbalance dataset, the performance measure used for the model selection and comparison to competing methods is a major issue. In order to overcome this problem several performance measures are defined and analyzed in several perspectives regarding in particular the imbalance ratio. There is still no clear indication which metric is universal and can be used for any skewed data problem. In this paper we introduced a new performance measure based on the harmonic mean of Recall and Selectivity normalized in class labels. This paper shows that the proposed performance measure has the right properties for the imbalanced dataset. In particular, in the space defined by the majority class examples and imbalance ratio it is less sensitive to changes in the majority class and more sensitive to changes in the minority class compared with other existing single-value performance measures. Additionally, the identity of the other performance measures has been proven analytically.