# ROC accuracy measure error when no positive values

I have an unbalanced dataset that I am working to either up or down sample to balance out. But in the meantime I've run into an interesting error when calculating the AUC in R using pROC::auc when no positive predictions are made.

The test prediction resulted in zero positive cases. It predicted all 0's in my binary response. Does it make intuitive sense that the function throws an error for the AUC in this case? Or should it be zero or some other result. I know that balanced accuracy and other confusion matrix measures will still produce some number even when there are no positive predictions.

table(trainy)
trainy
0     1
10716  1181

table(testy)
testy
0     1
10646  1250

cvfit <- glmnet(y=trainy, x=trainx, alpha=1, family="binomial")
cv.glmmod <- cv.glmnet(x=trainx, y=train[,.b], alpha=1, nfolds=10)

p <- predict(cvfit, newx = testx, type = "class", s = cv.glmmod$lambda.min) pred_class <- as.numeric(p) all(pred_class == 0) [1] TRUE auc(pred_class, testy) Error in roc.default(response, predictor, auc = TRUE, ...) : No case observation.  ## 2 Answers ROC curves assume that the predictions are continuous values (such as predicted probabilities). You're using predictions of the form$\hat{y}=1$or$\hat{y}=0\$, which is nonsensical for ROC analysis because ROC analysis is about assessing the trade-off between true positives and false positives at different thresholds for an alarm.

This question is a very good introduction to the topic.

AUC doesn't take into account binary predictions. It takes into account the continuous score your model outputs. You should look if there are positive cases, not predictions, in your resampled test data.

If there are only samples from one class, AUC won't be computed.

• I have 1000+ positive cases in the test data. – Pierre Lafortune Sep 21 '16 at 14:37