Robust performance metrics for imbalanced classification problems

The paper demonstrates that common binary classification metrics—Matthews' correlation coefficient, Cohen's κ, the F-score, and the Jaccard similarity—are not robust to extreme class imbalance, as the Bayes classifier’s true positive rate tends to zero when the minority class proportion vanishes. To address this, the authors propose robustified versions of these metrics that include a tuning parameter, ensuring that the Bayes-optimal classifier’s threshold remains bounded and its true positive rate stays above zero even in highly imbalanced scenarios. The study provides theoretical bounds, simulation results, and practical guidance on applying these robust metrics to real data, such as a credit‑default dataset, and discusses their relationship to ROC and precision‑recall curves.

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