What are some ways to increase precision or recall in machine learning?

What are some ways to Boost Precision and Recall in Machine Learning?

Sensitivity vs Specificity?

In machine learning, recall is the ability of the model to find all relevant instances in the data while precision is the ability of the model to correctly identify only the relevant instances. A high recall means that most relevant results are returned while a high precision means that most of the returned results are relevant. Ideally, you want a model with both high recall and high precision but often there is a trade-off between the two. In this blog post, we will explore some ways to increase recall or precision in machine learning.

There are two main ways to increase recall:

by increasing the number of false positives or by decreasing the number of false negatives. To increase the number of false positives, you can lower your threshold for what constitutes a positive prediction. For example, if you are trying to predict whether or not an email is spam, you might lower the threshold for what constitutes spam so that more emails are classified as spam. This will result in more false positives (emails that are not actually spam being classified as spam) but will also increase recall (more actual spam emails being classified as spam).

To decrease the number of false negatives,

you can increase your threshold for what constitutes a positive prediction. For example, going back to the spam email prediction example, you might raise the threshold for what constitutes spam so that fewer emails are classified as spam. This will result in fewer false negatives (actual spam emails not being classified as spam) but will also decrease recall (fewer actual spam emails being classified as spam).

There are two main ways to increase precision:

by increasing the number of true positives or by decreasing the number of true negatives. To increase the number of true positives, you can raise your threshold for what constitutes a positive prediction. For example, using the spam email prediction example again, you might raise the threshold for what constitutes spam so that fewer emails are classified as spam. This will result in more true positives (emails that are actually spam being classified as spam) but will also decrease precision (more non-spam emails being classified as spam).

To decrease the number of true negatives,

you can lower your threshold for what constitutes a positive prediction. For example, going back to the spam email prediction example once more, you might lower the threshold for what constitutes spam so that more emails are classified as spam. This will result in fewer true negatives (emails that are not actually spam not being classified as spam) but will also decrease precision (more non-spam emails being classified as spam).

To summarize,

there are a few ways to increase precision or recall in machine learning. One way is to use a different evaluation metric. For example, if you are trying to maximize precision, you can use the F1 score, which is a combination of precision and recall. Another way to increase precision or recall is to adjust the threshold for classification. This can be done by changing the decision boundary or by using a different algorithm altogether.

Sensitivity vs Specificity

In machine learning, sensitivity and specificity are two measures of the performance of a model. Sensitivity is the proportion of true positives that are correctly predicted by the model, while specificity is the proportion of true negatives that are correctly predicted by the model.

Google Colab For Machine Learning

State of the Google Colab for ML (October 2022)

Google introduced computing units, which you can purchase just like any other cloud computing unit you can from AWS or Azure etc. With Pro you get 100, and with Pro+ you get 500 computing units. GPU, TPU and option of High-RAM effects how much computing unit you use hourly. If you don’t have any computing units, you can’t use “Premium” tier gpus (A100, V100) and even P100 is non-viable.

Google Colab Pro+ comes with Premium tier GPU option, meanwhile in Pro if you have computing units you can randomly connect to P100 or T4. After you use all of your computing units, you can buy more or you can use T4 GPU for the half or most of the time (there can be a lot of times in the day that you can’t even use a T4 or any kinds of GPU). In free tier, offered gpus are most of the time K80 and P4, which performs similar to a 750ti (entry level gpu from 2014) with more VRAM.

For your consideration, T4 uses around 2, and A100 uses around 15 computing units hourly.
Based on the current knowledge, computing units costs for GPUs tend to fluctuate based on some unknown factor.

Considering those:

1. For hobbyists and (under)graduate school duties, it will be better to use your own gpu if you have something with more than 4 gigs of VRAM and better than 750ti, or atleast purchase google pro to reach T4 even if you have no computing units remaining.
2. For small research companies, and non-trivial research at universities, and probably for most of the people Colab now probably is not a good option.
3. Colab Pro+ can be considered if you want Pro but you don’t sit in front of your computer, since it disconnects after 90 minutes of inactivity in your computer. But this can be overcomed with some scripts to some extend. So for most of the time Colab Pro+ is not a good option.

If you have anything more to say, please let me know so I can edit this post with them. Thanks!

Conclusion:

In machine learning, precision and recall trade off against each other; increasing one often decreases the other. There is no single silver bullet solution for increasing either precision or recall; it depends on your specific use case which one is more important and which methods will work best for boosting whichever metric you choose. In this blog post, we explored some methods for increasing either precision or recall; hopefully this gives you a starting point for improving your own models!

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