Effective evaluation metrics are crucial in assessing the performance of machine learning models. One of such metrics is the F1 score, which is widely used for classification problems, information retrieval, and NLP tasks.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the foundational concepts of the F1 score, discuss its limitations, and look at use cases across diverse domains.
What is the F1 score in machine learning?
The performance of ML algorithms is measured using a set of evaluation metrics, with model accuracy being among the commonly used ones.
Accuracy calculates the number of correct predictions made by a model across the entire dataset, which is valid when the dataset classes are balanced in size. In the past, accuracy was the sole criterion for comparing machine learning models.
But real-world datasets often exhibit heavy class imbalance, rendering the accuracy metric impractical. For instance, in a binary class dataset with 90 samples in class 1 and 10 samples in class 2, a model that consistently predicts “class 1” would still achieve 90% accuracy. But can we consider this model a good predictor?
Today data scientists use the precision measure alongside accuracy. While accuracy assesses the proximity to the actual value of the measurement, precision indicates the proximity of the predicted values to each other.
The bullseye analogy is commonly used to illustrate the difference between accuracy and precision. Imagine you are throwing darts at a bullseye with the goal of achieving both accuracy and precision, meaning you want to consistently hit the bullseye. Accuracy refers to landing your throws near the bullseye, but not necessarily hitting it every time. On the other hand, precision means your throws cluster closely together, but they may not be near the bullseye. However, when you are both accurate and precise, your darts will consistently hit the bullseye.
An alternative evaluation metric in machine learning is the F1 score, which assesses the predictive ability of a model by examining its performance on each…
