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The Daily Insight

What does the AUC tell us

Author

Emma Valentine

Published Mar 02, 2026

The Area Under the Curve (AUC) is the measure of the ability of a classifier to distinguish between classes and is used as a summary of the ROC curve. The higher the AUC, the better the performance of the model at distinguishing between the positive and negative classes.

What is considered a good AUC?

The area under the ROC curve (AUC) results were considered excellent for AUC values between 0.9-1, good for AUC values between 0.8-0.9, fair for AUC values between 0.7-0.8, poor for AUC values between 0.6-0.7 and failed for AUC values between 0.5-0.6.

How do you explain AUC from a probability perspective?

The AUC is the area under the ROC curve. It is a number between zero and one, because the ROC curve fits inside a unit square. Any model worth much of anything has an AUC larger than 0.5, as the line segment running between (0, 0) and (1, 1) represents a model that randomly guesses class membership.

What does AUC mean in pharmacokinetics?

In pharmacology, the area under the plot of plasma concentration of a drug versus time after dosage (called “area under the curve” or AUC) gives insight into the extent of exposure to a drug and its clearance rate from the body.

How can I improve my AUC?

In order to improve AUC, it is overall to improve the performance of the classifier. Several measures could be taken for experimentation. However, it will depend on the problem and the data to decide which measure will work.

What does AUC of 0.6 mean?

In general, the rule of thumb for interpreting AUC value is: AUC=0.5. No discrimination, e.g., randomly flip a coin. 0.6≥AUC>0.5. Poor discrimination.

Can AUC be higher than accuracy?

First, as we discussed earlier, even with labelled training and testing examples, most classifiers do produce probability estimations that can rank training/testing examples. … As we establish that AUC is a better measure than accuracy, we can choose classifiers with better AUC, thus producing better ranking.

How do you get AUC clearance?

AUC becomes useful for knowing the average concentration over a time interval, AUC/t. Also, AUC is referenced when talking about elimination. The amount eliminated by the body (mass) = clearance (volume/time) * AUC (mass*time/volume).

What does AUC 0 mean?

When AUC is 0.7, it means there is a 70% chance that the model will be able to distinguish between positive class and negative class. … When AUC is approximately 0, the model is actually reciprocating the classes. It means the model is predicting a negative class as a positive class and vice versa.

What factors affect AUC?

The AUC is directly proportional to the dose when the drug follows linear kinetics. The AUC is inversely proportional to the clearance of the drug. That is, the higher the clearance, the less time the drug spends in the systemic circulation and the faster the decline in the plasma drug concentration.

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How do you interpret area under a curve?

AREA UNDER THE ROC CURVE In general, an AUC of 0.5 suggests no discrimination (i.e., ability to diagnose patients with and without the disease or condition based on the test), 0.7 to 0.8 is considered acceptable, 0.8 to 0.9 is considered excellent, and more than 0.9 is considered outstanding.

How do you draw a ROC curve?

To plot the ROC curve, we need to calculate the TPR and FPR for many different thresholds (This step is included in all relevant libraries as scikit-learn ). For each threshold, we plot the FPR value in the x-axis and the TPR value in the y-axis. We then join the dots with a line. That’s it!

What is threshold in ROC curve?

The threshold is then used to locate the true and false positive rates, then this point is drawn on the ROC Curve. We can see that the point for the optimal threshold is a large black dot and it appears to be closest to the top-left of the plot.

Is AUC good for Imbalanced Data?

ROC AUC and Precision-Recall AUC provide scores that summarize the curves and can be used to compare classifiers. ROC Curves and ROC AUC can be optimistic on severely imbalanced classification problems with few samples of the minority class.

How do you calculate AUC from confusion matrix?

  1. First make a plot of ROC curve by using confusion matrix.
  2. Normalize data, so that X and Y axis should be in unity. Even you can divide data values with maximum value of data.
  3. Use Trapezoidal method to calculate AUC.
  4. Maximum value of AUC is one.

What is false positive in confusion matrix?

false positives (FP): We predicted yes, but they don’t actually have the disease. (Also known as a “Type I error.”) false negatives (FN): We predicted no, but they actually do have the disease.

Why is my AUC so high?

3 Answers. One possible reason you can get high AUROC with what some might consider a mediocre prediction is if you have imbalanced data (in favor of the “zero” prediction), high recall, and low precision.

Is AUC a good performance measure?

AUC is better measure of classifier performance than accuracy because it does not bias on size of test or evaluation data. Accuracy is always biased on size of test data. In most of the cases, we use 20% data as evaluation or test data for our algorithm of total training data.

What is a good F1 score?

An F1 score is considered perfect when it’s 1 , while the model is a total failure when it’s 0 . Remember: All models are wrong, but some are useful. That is, all models will generate some false negatives, some false positives, and possibly both.

What does AUC below 0.5 mean?

Usually, the AUC is in the range [0.5,1] because useful classifiers should perform better than random. In principle, however, the AUC can also be smaller than 0.5, which indicates that a classifier performs worse than a random classifier.

How do you draw AUC curve in Python?

  1. Step 1 – Import the library – GridSearchCv. …
  2. Step 2 – Setup the Data. …
  3. Step 3 – Spliting the data and Training the model. …
  4. Step 5 – Using the models on test dataset. …
  5. Step 6 – Creating False and True Positive Rates and printing Scores. …
  6. Step 7 – Ploting ROC Curves.

What does AUC mean in chemotherapy?

area under the curve. A representation of total drug exposure. The area-under-the-curve is a function of (1) the length of time the drug is present, and (2) the concentration of the drug in blood plasma.

How do you calculate AUC score in Python?

  1. Step 1: Import Packages. First, we’ll import the packages necessary to perform logistic regression in Python: import pandas as pd import numpy as np from sklearn. …
  2. Step 2: Fit the Logistic Regression Model. …
  3. Step 3: Calculate the AUC.

How can I improve my AUC ROC score?

One possible alternative (depending on your classification technique) is to use class weights instead using sampling techniques. Adding a greater penalty to misclassifying your under represented class can reduce bias without “over training” on the under-represented class samples.

How do I choose the best threshold?

  1. Adjust some threshold value that control the number of examples labelled true or false. …
  2. Generate many sets of annotated examples.
  3. Run the classifier on the sets of examples.
  4. Compute a (FPR, TPR) point for each of them.
  5. Draw the final ROC curve.