Evaluating Learning Algorithms

Nathalie Japkowicz is Professor of Computer Science at American University. She is a former assistant professor at Dalhousie University and lecturer at Ohio State University. Japkowicz co-organized numerous workshops on classifier evaluation and the class imbalance problem at AAAI and ICML. She has published many articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Mohak Shah is an AI and technology executive with extensive experience in bringing data and AI products to market. He has held several senior leadership roles in large enterprises and startups driving both large-scale AI transformation initiatives and zero-to-one product journeys. He is the founder and Managing Director of Praescivi Advisors, a strategic AI advisory practice. As a research scientist, Mohak has published extensively in theoretical and applied machine learning areas.

"This treasure-trove of a book covers the important topic of performance evaluation of machine learning algorithms in a very comprehensive and lucid fashion. As Japkowicz and Shah point out, performance evaluation is too often a formulaic affair in machine learning, with scant appreciation of the appropriateness of the evaluation methods used or the interpretation of the results obtained. This book makes significant steps in rectifying this situation by providing a reasoned catalogue of evaluation measures and methods, written specifically for a machine learning audience and accompanied by concrete machine learning examples and implementations in R. This is truly a book to be savoured by machine learning professionals, and required reading for Ph.D students." Peter A. Flach, University of Bristol

• 1. Introduction; 2. Machine learning and statistics overview; 3. Performance measures I; 4. Performance measures II; 5. Error estimation; 6. Statistical significance testing; 7. Data sets and experimental framework; 8. Recent developments; 9. Conclusion; Appendix A: statistical tables; Appendix B: additional information on the data; Appendix C: two case studies.