Submitted by Assigned_Reviewer_1
Q1: Comments to author(s). First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed reviewing guidelines, see http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
(1) Another important disadvantage of recall precision curves is that they are not invariant with respect to the distribution of labels in the test data (proportion \pi). This should be also discussed in the paper. (2) Figure 5 should be included in the main paper, since it directly compares the ranking with respect to PR and PRG. (3) PR curves and average precision are standard tools for evaluating object detection approaches, e.g. for the Pascal VOC Challenge. It would be very interesting if the authors would be able to get access to the results in the challenge and rerank the entries of the competition according to precision recall gain curves. This would also increase the expected impact of the paper.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
This paper is easy to read and offers interesting insights important for many ML people. I really enjoyed reading it.
Submitted by Assigned_Reviewer_2
Q1: Comments to author(s). First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed reviewing guidelines, see http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper presents a Precision-Recall-Gain curves to evaluate the precision recall relationship in an efficient way. The analysis of, 1) baselines, 2) interpolation, 3) area under curve, 4) calibration and 5) optimality have been developed and explained for the introduced PRG curve. The paper suffers from lack of well experimental results presentation which have been posted to supplementary documents.
The writing needs more work in order to make it easy to read and follow.
Here is my comments and questions: 1- What is the last column in Contingency table in page 4? The TP at the third column should be TN?
2- What is x in line 243? I think it corresponds to a point in the PR curve. You need to explain any term when in used for the first time.
3- The figures are not clear in BW print.
4- Where is figure 5? You can't address any figure in supplementary documents in the paper.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
Interesting practical paper. However, the paper is not self-explanatory and hard to understand without supplementary documents. Writing need more work too.
Submitted by Assigned_Reviewer_3
Q1: Comments to author(s). First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed reviewing guidelines, see http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
Minor points *I think it would be able to try to give a sense of what precision gain and recall gain mean intuitively.
*I find the captions in the figures a bit confusing and difficult to work through. I think that this would be clearer if there were separate or sub figures.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
I think that this is an interesting paper as it increases our understanding of precision-recall space. It addresses important open issues about the PR space and should be published.
Submitted by Assigned_Reviewer_4
Q1: Comments to author(s). First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed reviewing guidelines, see http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
These authors demonstrate that traditional Precision-Recall (PR) curves and associated area under PR curve are fraught with difficulties.
They show how to fix this by plotting PR curves in a different coordinate system, and propose Precision-Recall-Gain curves which inherit all key advantages of ROC curves. This study is of interest to the readership and suitable for the NIPS audience. This innovative study will advance the field of performance assessment for predictive models and diagnostic tests. However, several problems are noted in the methods and clarity of presentation.
a. At line 390, what are AUROCs for IBK and Logistic Regression? b. It is difficult to interpret the information embedded in Figure 5.
I would recommend using a table to report the outcomes for five Weka models trained on 19 UCI datasets, and using Figure 5 to display performance for several examples including the mushroom dataset.
c. For Figure 5, it is better to avoid abbreviations and to provide detailed explanation so that it can stand alone. It is also better to provide the definition for IBK since it isn't a widely used model.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
These authors demonstrate that traditional Precision-Recall (PR) curves and associated area under PR curve are fraught with difficulties.
They show how to fix this by plotting PR curves in a different coordinate system, and propose Precision-Recall-Gain curves which inherit all key advantages of ROC curves.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 5000 characters. Note
however, that reviewers and area chairs are busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We thank the reviewers for their insightful
comments, and will address the issues raised and questions asked as much
as possible in this author response.
1. Several reviewers made
comments about the figures, and in particularly Fig.5. In the final
version we will (i) make sure all figures are clear in B/W; (ii) provide
separate captions for the left and right figures; (iii) move Fig.5 to the
main paper; (iv) clearly explain all models used in the experiment.
2. Another issue requiring clarification was raised by R4:
"david hand discusses other problems from a paper 6 years ago:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10994-009-5119-5#page-1 in
other words, ROC curves and AUC is useful, but known to be
problematic."
Thanks for raising this. First, note that Hand only
criticised AUC as a measure of classification performance (not ROC curves
as such, nor AUC as a measure of ranking performance). In his paper Hand
set out to relate AUC to expected misclassification loss under varying
cost proportions, but the derived relation was model-dependent as it
assumed optimal decision thresholds only. It has since been shown that if
thresholds are aggregated in a different way the model dependence vanishes
and AUC can be translated into expected loss, see citation [7] in the
paper. We will add a clarification to the paper. Note that Theorem 2 of
our paper uses similar ideas to relate AUPRG to expected F1 score.
3. (R1) "Another important disadvantage of recall precision
curves is that their not invariant with respect to the distribution of
labels in the test data (proportion \pi). This should be also discussed in
the paper."
This was intended to be captured under 'Non-universal
baselines' at the top of p.4. This will be emphasised more.
4.
(R1) "PR curves and average precision are a standard tool for evaluating
object detection approaches, e.g. for the Pascal VOC Challenge. It would
be very interesting if the authors would be able to get access to the
results in the challenge and rerank the entries of the competition
according to precision recall gain curves."
This is an excellent
suggestion, we have already contacted the organisers of the VOC Challenge.
5. (R2) "What is the last column in Contingency table in page
4? The TP at the third column should be TN?"
The last column and
the last row give row/column marginals, this will be clarified in the
paper. TP in the third column is correct, this reflects the fact that
F-score ignores TN and instead weights TP twice compared to FP and FN, see
Eq.(1).
6. (R2) "What is x in line 243?"
Here x refers
to an arbitrary value measured on a scale from min to max, which is then
mapped to the [0,1] interval by Eq.(3). We use this mapping to normalise
prec, rec, and F_beta. This will be clarified.
7. (R3) "At
line 390, what are AUROCs for IBK and Logistic Regression?"
The
numbers are as follows (these will be added to the paper):
model =
Logistic AUPR = 0.862069183648017 AUPRG = 0.864815307546806
AUROC = 0.934834227911619
model = IBk AUPR =
0.911434951724443 AUPRG = 0.837058453292835 AUROC =
0.870355895866427
8. (R6) "I think it would be able to try to
give a sense of what precision gain and recall gain mean
intuitively."
Eq.(3) on p.5 was meant to convey this intuition
(unfortunately it contains a small mistake: the numerator of the
right-hand side should read max*(x-min) rather than max*x-min. Since max=1
in all applications of this equation this doesn't affect subsequent
results). The key idea is to normalise using a harmonic scale rather than
a linear scale, since precision and recall are ratios.
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