Receiver operating characteristic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In statistics, a receiver operating characteristic (ROC), or ROC curve, is a graphical plot that illustrates the performance of a binary classifier system as its discrimination threshold is varied. The curve is created by plotting the true positive rate against the false positive rate at various threshold settings. (The true-positive rate is also known as sensitivity in biomedical informatics, or recall in machine learning. The false-positive rate is also known as the fall-out and can be calculated as 1 specificity). The ROC curve is thus the sensitivity as a function of fall-out. In general, if the probability distributions for both detection and false alarm are known, the ROC curve can be generated by plotting the cumulative distribution function (area under the probability distribution from to ) of the detection probability in the y-axis versus the cumulative distribution function of the false-alarm probability in x-axis.