Area Under the ROC Curve

ROC curve and Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) are widely-used metric for binary (i.e., positive or negative) classification problems such as Logistic Regression.

Binary classifiers generally predict how likely a sample is to be positive by computing probability. Ultimately, we can evaluate the classifiers by comparing the probabilities with truth positive/negative labels.

Now we assume that there is a table which contains predicted scores (i.e., probabilities) and truth labels as follows:

probability (predicted score)	truth label
0.5	0
0.3	1
0.2	0
0.8	1
0.7	1

Once the rows are sorted by the probabilities in a descending order, AUC gives a metric based on how many positive (label=1) samples are ranked higher than negative (label=0) samples. If many positive rows get larger scores than negative rows, AUC would be large, and hence our classifier would perform well.

Compute AUC on Hivemall

In Hivemall, a function auc(double score, int label) provides a way to compute AUC for pairs of probability and truth label.

Sequential AUC computation on a single node

For instance, the following query computes AUC of the table which was shown above:

with data as (
  select 0.5 as prob, 0 as label
  union all
  select 0.3 as prob, 1 as label
  union all
  select 0.2 as prob, 0 as label
  union all
  select 0.8 as prob, 1 as label
  union all
  select 0.7 as prob, 1 as label
)
select
  auc(prob, label) as auc
from (
  select prob, label
  from data
  ORDER BY prob DESC
) t;

This query returns 0.83333 as AUC.

Since AUC is a metric based on ranked probability-label pairs as mentioned above, input data (rows) needs to be ordered by scores in a descending order.

Parallel approximate AUC computation

Meanwhile, Hive's distribute by clause allows you to compute AUC in parallel:

with data as (
  select 0.5 as prob, 0 as label
  union all
  select 0.3 as prob, 1 as label
  union all
  select 0.2 as prob, 0 as label
  union all
  select 0.8 as prob, 1 as label
  union all
  select 0.7 as prob, 1 as label
)
select
  auc(prob, label) as auc
from (
  select prob, label
  from data
  DISTRIBUTE BY floor(prob / 0.2)
  SORT BY prob DESC
) t;

Note that floor(prob / 0.2) means that the rows are distributed to 5 bins for the AUC computation because the column prob is in a [0, 1] range.

Difference between AUC and Logarithmic Loss

Hivemall has another metric called Logarithmic Loss for binary classification. Both AUC and Logarithmic Loss compute scores for probability-label pairs.

Score produced by AUC is a relative metric based on sorted pairs. On the other hand, Logarithmic Loss simply gives a metric by comparing probability with its truth label one-by-one.

To give an example, auc(prob, label) and logloss(prob, label) respectively returns 0.83333 and 0.54001 in the above case. Note that larger AUC and smaller Logarithmic Loss are better.