Receiver operating characteristic

Definition

The receiver operating characteristic, also known as the ROC curve, is the curve for a binary classifier (that can provide a relative rank-ordering of any two examples) made in the two-dimensional plane, starting at the origin ((0,0)) and ending at the point (1,1). The curve is defined as follows.

First, we use the classifier to rank-order all the examples, for instance, by placing them on a line.

For now, you can read the Wikipedia page Receiver operating characteristic.