Classifier loss under metric uncertainty

Abstract

Classifiers that are deployed in the field can be used and evaluated in ways that were not anticipated when the model was trained. The final evaluation metric may not have been known at training time, additional performance criteria may have been added, the evaluation metric may have changed over time, or the real-world evaluation procedure may have been impossible to simulate. Unforeseen ways of measuring model utility can degrade performance. Our objective is to provide experimental support for modelers who face potential "cross-metric" performance deterioration. First, to identify model-selection metrics that lead to stronger cross-metric performance, we characterize the expected loss where the selection metric is held fixed and the evaluation metric is varied. Second, we show that the number of data points evaluated by a selection metric has substantial impact on the optimal evaluation. While addressing these issues, we consider the effect of calibrating the classifiers to output probabilities influences. Our experiments show that if models are well calibrated, cross-entropy is the highest-performing selection metric if little data is available for model selection. With these experiments, modelers may be in a better position to choose selection metrics that are robust where it is uncertain what evaluation metric will be applied. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.