Description: Specificity in the context of supervised learning refers to a model’s ability to correctly identify negative instances within a dataset. In other words, it measures the proportion of true negatives that the model can detect in relation to the total number of negative instances. This concept is crucial in evaluating the performance of classification models, especially in situations where classes are imbalanced. High specificity indicates that the model is effective at avoiding false positives, which is essential in applications where the cost of a type I error (false positive) is high. For example, in various fields such as medical diagnosis or fraud detection, high specificity means that the model can correctly identify cases that do not belong to the positive class, thereby minimizing the risk of misclassification. Specificity is complemented by other metrics such as sensitivity, which measures the model’s ability to identify true positives. Together, these metrics provide a more comprehensive view of model performance, allowing researchers and professionals to adjust their algorithms to optimize both the detection of positive instances and the correct identification of negative ones.
