Data Science and Statistics

Accuracy, explained

Accuracy is the fraction of predictions a model gets correct.
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Part of the Semantic Notion technical glossary.

Short Definition

Accuracy is the fraction of predictions a model gets correct.

Intuition

Accuracy answers a simple question: out of all examples, how many were right?

Technical Definition

Accuracy equals correct predictions divided by total predictions, usually for classification tasks.

Example

If a classifier gets 90 of 100 examples correct, its accuracy is 90 percent.

Common Misunderstandings

Accuracy can be misleading on imbalanced datasets.
High accuracy does not guarantee useful precision or recall.

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