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respeckKnuckles t1_it8ovi2 wrote

Is there a reason then that it's not common to see what the actual threshold is on graphs of AUC-ROC curves? It seems like it would be very helpful to have a little mark on the curve itself for when the threshold is 0.5, for example.

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Professional_Pay_806 t1_ita6elf wrote

The threshold isn't important for what the ROC curve is trying to show. You can think about the ROC curve as representing a range of thresholds from the point where all samples are classified as negative (TPR of 0 and FPR of 0), and the point where all samples are classified as positive (TPR of 1 and FPR of 1). The space between is what matters. For a robust classifier, the true positive rate will rise significantly faster than the false positive rate. So a steep slope at the beginning approaching 1 while FPR is still low (which tends to AUC of 1) means the classifier is robust. The closer the AUC is to 1/2 (represented by the diagonal connecting bottom left to top right), the closer the classifier is to effectively tossing a coin and guessing positive if you get heads. It's not about what the specific threshold is, it's about how well-separated the data clusters are in the feature space where the threshold is being used. Thinking about a threshold as typically being 0.5 (because you're just looking for a maximum likelihood of correct classification in a softmax layer or something) is thinking about one very specific type of classifier. The ROC curve is meant to be showing something more generally applicable to any classifier in any feature space.

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Professional_Pay_806 t1_ita6rxs wrote

Note you could always perform a linear transformation on your classification layer that shifts your threshold to another arbitrary value with the exact same results, but the ROC curve will remain the same as it was before.

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DigThatData t1_it8rc38 wrote

that's a variant that people definitely do sometimes. If you think adding score annotations a particular way should be an out-of-the-box feature in a particular tool you use, you should create an issue on their gh to recommend it or implement it yourself and submit a PR.

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