Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

Binary and multiclass classification

Binary classifiers are used to separate the elements of a given dataset into one of two possible groups (for example, fraud or not fraud) and are a special case of multiclass classification. Most binary classification metrics can be generalized to multiclass classification metrics. A multiclass classification describes a classification problem, where there are M>2 possible labels for each data point (the case where M=2 is the binary classification problem).

For multiclass metrics, the notion of positives and negatives is slightly different. Predictions and labels can still be positive or negative, but they must be considered in the context of a particular class. Each label and prediction takes on the value ...