Generalization Bounds for the Area Under the ROC Curve
Shivani Agarwal,
Thore Graepel,
Sariel Har-Peled,
Ralf Herbrich,
and Dan Roth.
We study generalization properties of the area under the ROC curve
(AUC), a quantity that has been advocated as an evaluation
criterion for the bipartite ranking problem. The AUC is a
different term than the error rate used for evaluation in
classification problems; consequently, existing generalization
bounds for the classification error rate cannot be used to draw
conclusions about the AUC. In this paper, we define the expected
accuracy of a ranking function (analogous to the expected error
rate of a classification function), and derive distribution-free
probabilistic bounds on the deviation of the empirical AUC of a
ranking function (observed on a finite data sequence) from its
expected accuracy. We derive both a large deviation bound, which
serves to bound the expected accuracy of a ranking function in
terms of its empirical AUC on a test sequence, and a uniform
convergence bound, which serves to bound the expected accuracy of
a learned ranking function in terms of its empirical AUC on a
training sequence. Our uniform convergence bound is expressed in
terms of a new set of combinatorial parameters that we term the
bipartite rank-shatter coefficients; these play the same role in
our result as do the standard VC-dimension related shatter
coefficients (also known as the growth function) in uniform
convergence results for the classification error rate. A
comparison of our result with a recent uniform convergence result
derived by [FreundIyScSi03] for a quantity closely related to
the AUC shows that the bound provided by our result can be
considerably tighter.