Precision

How it is used

Used together with recall to evaluate classification models. Precision matters most when false positives are costly, for example when a customer's card is blocked by mistake. 'Precision at k' is used for ranked results such as search.

Example sentences

1. The spam filter has high precision: almost everything it blocks really is spam.

2. If we lower the threshold, recall goes up but precision goes down.

Common collocations

• high precision
• precision and recall
• improve precision
• precision score

Related terms

• recallOf all the cases that really are positive, the share that a model correctly finds; high recall means the model misses few real cases.
• accuracyThe share of all predictions that a model gets right; for example, 90 correct predictions out of 100 means an accuracy of 90%.
• classificationA type of modelling task in which the model predicts which category something belongs to, such as spam or not spam, or which product a review is about.
• baselineA simple reference point, such as last year's figure, the current version or a very basic model, against which new results are compared.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• precision · Software Engineering
• precision · Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

More terms: Modelling and Machine Learning

• model
• feature
• training data
• overfitting
• regression
• cross-validation
• feature engineering
• target variable
• test set
• clustering