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Explainer: What Is a ROC Curve and AUC? #82

Description

@yakew7

Concept

ROC curves and the area under the curve (AUC) as evaluation tools, and why a high AUC can still hide group-level unfairness.

One-sentence definition

A ROC curve plots true positive rate against false positive rate across every decision threshold, and AUC summarizes that curve as a single number.

What real data will illustrate it?

Plot per-group ROC curves from one of the healthcare audits (Healthcare Readmission) to show that equal overall AUC can mask different per-group curves.

Limitations / trade-offs

AUC is threshold-independent and can look strong while calibration and error rates differ sharply across groups. Good first issue for someone comfortable with matplotlib.

Hyphens only - no em dashes.

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