View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Wellesley College Wellesley College Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive Honors Thesis Collection 2019 An Unbiased Variance Estimator of a K-sample U- statistic with Application to AUC in Binary Classification Alexandria Guo
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection Recommended Citation Guo, Alexandria, "An Unbiased Variance Estimator of a K-sample U-statistic with Application to AUC in Binary Classification" (2019). Honors Thesis Collection. 624. https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection/624 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Thesis Collection by an authorized administrator of Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. An Unbiased Variance Estimator of a K-sample U-statistic with Application to AUC in Binary Classification Alexandria Guo Under the Advisement of Professor Qing Wang A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in the Department of Mathematics, Wellesley College May 2019 © 2019 Alexandria Guo Abstract Many questions in research can be rephrased as binary classification tasks, to find simple yes-or- no answers. For example, does a patient have a tumor? Should this email be classified as spam? For classifiers trained to answer these queries, area under the ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve (AUC) is a popular metric for assessing the performance of a binary classification method, where a larger AUC score indicates an overall better binary classifier.