"Splendid Healthcare" has started developing a cancer detection system based on ML.

Prevalence Rate and Model Performance:

The cancer detection system being developed by "Splendid Healthcare" needs to account for the fact that the type of cancer has a 2% prevalence rate in the population. This indicates that the dataset is highly imbalanced with far fewer positive (cancer) cases compared to negative (normal) cases.

Importance of Recall:

Recall, also known as sensitivity or true positive rate, measures the proportion of actual positive cases that are correctly identified by the model. In medical diagnosis, especially cancer detection, recall is critical because missing a positive case (false negative) could have severe consequences for the patient. Therefore, maximizing recall ensures that most, if not all, cancer cases are detected.

Importance of Precision:

Precision measures the proportion of predicted positive cases that are actually positive. High precision reduces the number of false positives, meaning fewer people will be incorrectly diagnosed with cancer. This is also important to avoid unnecessary anxiety and further invasive testing for those who do not have the disease.

Balancing Recall and Precision:

In scenarios where both false negatives and false positives have significant consequences, it is crucial to balance recall and precision. This balance ensures that the model is not only good at detecting positive cases but also accurate in its predictions, reducing both types of errors.

Accuracy and Specificity:

While accuracy (the proportion of total correct predictions) is important, it can be misleading in imbalanced datasets. In this case, high accuracy could simply result from the model predicting the majority class (normal) correctly. Specificity (true negative rate) is also important, but for a cancer detection system, recall and precision take precedence to ensure positive cases are correctly and accurately identified.

Conclusion:

Therefore, for a cancer detection system with a low prevalence rate, maximizing both recall and precision is crucial to ensure effective and accurate detection of cancer cases.