The advantages of the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) over F1 score and accuracy in binary classification evaluation.

Journal: BMC genomics
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: To evaluate binary classifications and their confusion matrices, scientific researchers can employ several statistical rates, accordingly to the goal of the experiment they are investigating. Despite being a crucial issue in machine learning, no widespread consensus has been reached on a unified elective chosen measure yet. Accuracy and F score computed on confusion matrices have been (and still are) among the most popular adopted metrics in binary classification tasks. However, these statistical measures can dangerously show overoptimistic inflated results, especially on imbalanced datasets.

Authors

  • Davide Chicco
    Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Comunicazione, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
  • Giuseppe Jurman
    a Fondazione Bruno Kessler , Trento , Italy.