Understanding Confusion Matrix in R
• October 15, 2018 • 5 min read
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Calculate a confusion matrix
As you saw in the video, a confusion matrix is a very useful tool for calibrating the output of a model and examining all possible outcomes of your predictions (true positive, true negative, false positive, false negative).
Before you make your confusion matrix, you need to "cut" your predicted probabilities at a given threshold to turn probabilities into class predictions. You can do this easily with the ifelse()
function, e.g.:
class_prediction <-
ifelse(probability_prediction > 0.50,
"positive_class",
"negative_class"
)
You could make such a contingency table with the table()
function in base R, but confusionMatrix()
in caret
yields a lot of useful ancillary statistics in addition to the base rates in the table. You can calculate the confusion matrix (and the associated statistics) using the predicted outcomes as well as the actual outcomes, e.g.:
confusionMatrix(predicted, actual)
Instructions
- Turn the numeric predictions
p
into a vector of class predictions calledp_class
, using a prediction cutoff of 0.50. Make sure to use"M"
for the positive class and"R"
for the negative class when making predictions, to match the classes in the original data. - Make a confusion matrix using
p_class
, the actual values in thetest
set, and theconfusionMatrix()
function.
If that makes sense keep going to the next exercise! If not, here is an overview video.
Overview Video on Confusion Matrix
From probabilities to confusion matrix
Conversely, say you want to be really certain that your model correctly identifies all the mines as mines. In this case, you might use a prediction threshold of 0.10, instead of 0.90.
You can construct the confusion matrix in the same way you did before, using your new predicted classes:
pred <- ifelse(probability > threshold, "M", "R")
You can then call the confusionMatrix()
function in the same way as in the previous exercise:
confusionMatrix(pred, actual)
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