# Does the class label has an influence on the accuracy?

I recently had a discussion about machine learning. They said that they had problems with "accuracy" of the classifier, as far as I understood they used SVM. To solve the problem, they then switched the class label. The classifier has two classes, class A was labeled with 0 while class B was labeled with 1, so after the switch class A would be 1 and class B 0. But they would not change the definition, that samples with label 1 are "positive" and label 0 corresponds to a "negative" result.

They stated, that this switch alone increased the "accuracy" of the classifier. I write "accuracy", as I'm not sure if they actually meant the metric.

I do not see a reason why switching the class label should have any influence on the classifier. All you should see is, that the confusion matrix flips around, as you changed somehow the definition of "positive" and "negative" classes. Hence, also the metrices like precision and recall change, but the accuracy should stay the same.

But maybe I'm missing something here. Are there any classifiers which will have different results depending on the labeling of the classes?