Papers › Overcoming Common Flaws in the Evaluation of Selective Classification Systems

Overcoming Common Flaws in the Evaluation of Selective Classification Systems

1 Jul 2024arXiv:2407.01032archive 2025-07-28

Jeremias Traub, Till J. Bungert, Carsten T. Lüth, Michael Baumgartner, Klaus H. Maier-Hein, Lena Maier-Hein, Paul F Jaeger

Selective Classification, wherein models can reject low-confidence predictions, promises reliable translation of machine-learning based classification systems to real-world scenarios such as clinical diagnostics. While current evaluation of these systems typically assumes fixed working points based on pre-defined rejection thresholds, methodological progress requires benchmarking the general performance of systems akin to the AUROC in standard classification. In this work, we define 5 requirements for multi-threshold metrics in selective classification regarding task alignment, interpretability, and flexibility, and show how current approaches fail to meet them. We propose the Area under the Generalized Risk Coverage curve (AUGRC), which meets all requirements and can be directly interpreted as the average risk of undetected failures. We empirically demonstrate the relevance of AUGRC on a comprehensive benchmark spanning 6 data sets and 13 confidence scoring functions. We find that the proposed metric substantially changes metric rankings on 5 out of the 6 data sets.

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