The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of the test set is used throughout machine learning (ML) for assessing a model’s performance. However, when concordance is not the only ambition, this gives only a partial insight into performance, masking distribution shifts of model outputs and model instability.
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Change history
12 April 2024
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-024-00834-6
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Roberts, M., Hazan, A., Dittmer, S. et al. The curious case of the test set AUROC. Nat Mach Intell 6, 373–376 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-024-00817-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-024-00817-7
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