What is AUC?

Data Science Interview Questions based on AUC.

Vimarsh Karbhari
Acing AI
2 min readJun 25, 2019

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Few weeks ago, I wrote about ROC curves. The purpose was to provide a basic primer on ROC curves. As a follow up, this article talks about AUC.

AUC stands for Area Under the Curve. ROC can be quantified using AUC. The way it is done is to see how much area has been covered by the ROC curve. If we obtain a perfect classifier, then the AUC score is 1.0. If the classifier is random in its guesses, then the AUC score is 0.5. In the real world, we don’t expect an AUC score of 1.0, but if the AUC score for the classifier is in the range of 0.6 to 0.9, then it is considered to be a good classifier.

AUC for the ROC curve

In the preceding figure, the area under the curve which has been covered becomes our AUC score. This gives us an indication of how good or bad our classifier is performing. ROC and AUC are the two indicators that can provide us with insights on how our classifier performs.

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Reference: ML Solutions

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