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I have a plot of ROC curves for about 5 models. The curves are overlapping, as shown in the attached figure.

enter image description here

Is there a way to still call out the differences between these models in a research paper using a ROC curve, or do I present the AUC values in a metrics table?

Note: when you break the axis and for example use log scale, it is still overlapping because the data values are of the form(Where M1 = model1 and M2 is model 2.):

+--------+---------+------------+---------+
| FPR_M1 | TPR_M1  | FPR_M2     | TPR_M2  |
+--------+---------+------------+---------+
| 0      | 0       | 0          | 0       |
| 0      | 0.99452 | 0          | 0.93296 |
| 0      | 0.99563 | 0          | 0.97548 |
| 0      | 0.99728 | 0          | 0.98833 |
| 0      | 0.99863 | 0          | 0.99995 |
| 0      | 1       | 0          | 1       |
| 1      | 1       | 3.70233E-5 | 1       |
|        |         | 6.17055E-5 | 1       |
|        |         | 8.63878E-5 | 1       |
|        |         | 1.60434E-4 | 1       |
|        |         | 2.34481E-4 | 1       |
|        |         | 3.3321E-4  | 1       |
|        |         | 4.07257E-4 | 1       |
|        |         | 5.18327E-4 | 1       |
|        |         | 7.15784E-4 | 1       |
|        |         | 8.63878E-4 | 1       |
|        |         | 0.00127    | 1       |
|        |         | 0.00202    | 1       |
|        |         | 0.00327    | 1       |
|        |         | 0.00585    | 1       |
|        |         | 0.01319    | 1       |
|        |         | 0.05294    | 1       |
|        |         | 1          | 1       |
+--------+---------+------------+---------+


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1 Answer 1

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I do not think there is a reason to show these AUC-ROC curves. With AUC scores approximating $1$ all curves are going to look the same and convey the same information. Having a small one-row table will be more than enough (probably in the Appendix even).

I would suggest using another metric/visualisation to communicate meaningful/any differences between model performance characteristics (if relevant).

(And to point at the elephant in the room: AUC-ROC scores so close to $1$ will raise strong suspicions about overfitting the test set. I hope that this is properly addressed in the paper.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the suggestion above and for pointing to the elephant in the room. I will consider using another metric and go back to the training pipeline to see if data leakage might lead to overfitting. $\endgroup$
    – cidi30bg
    Mar 5 at 19:13

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