Q2Machine Learning
Question
2 marks
Define precision and recall.
Answer
Precision measures the mathematical accuracy of positive predictions (True Positives / Predicted Positives), while Recall measures the ability to detect all actual positive instances (True Positives / Actual Positives).
In binary classification, Precision () violently penalizes False Positives (e.g., falsely diagnosing a healthy patient with cancer). Recall () aggressively penalizes False Negatives (e.g., missing an actual cancer diagnosis). Engineers use the F1-Score to mathematically balance these conflicting metrics.