On the Reliability of the Area Under the ROC Curve in Empirical Software Engineering
Luigi Lavazza, Sandro Morasca, Gabriele Rotoloni · 2023
Binary classifiers are commonly used in software engineering research to estimate several software qualities, e.g., defectiveness or vulnerability. Thus, it is important to adequately evaluate how well binary classifiers perform, before they are used in practice. The Area Under the Curve (AUC) of Receiver Operating Characteristic curves has often been used to this end. However, AUC has been the target of some criticisms, so it is necessary to evaluate under what conditions and to what extent AUC can be a reliable performance metric.