Why although my precision for class 1 is very low (0.05), and the recall is 0.92, the Precision Recall plot shows decent results?

Question

I have trained a classifier I am experimenting on, using a highly imbalanced data set (284,807 transactions and out of them 370 are of class 1) and I get the following results.

          precision    recall  f1-score   support

       0       1.00      0.97      0.98     28432
       1       0.05      0.92      0.09        49

I use the predict_proba function from sklearn to get the probabilities matrix, and then I use the precision_recall_curve(test_labels, prob[:, 1]) to get the Precision and the Recall for my plot. But the resulting plot I get from pyplot.plot(recall, precision) comes out like this:

My question is it possible to have those results and still get a Precision Recall Curve looking like that and if yes how is it explained?

Thank you in advance for any answers.

Answer 1

PR curve plot displays metrics for every possible classification threshold. If you did not resample your data, the optimal threshold will be far from the default 0.5 used by predict() or classification_report() (which is somewhere in the lower right corner now).

However, PR curve isn't just a nice visualization. Its values can be used for the optimal threshold selection - for example, the best F1 metric:

probabilities = model.predict_proba(...)
precision, recall, thresholds = precision_recall_curve(test_labels, probabilities[:, 1])
# Vectorized operation:
f1_scores = 2 * recall * precision / (recall + precision)
best_f1 = np.max(f1_scores)
best_thresh = thresholds[np.argmax(f1_scores)]
best_predictions = (probabilities > best_thresh)