How Are Precision and Recall Calculated?

In data classification, precision (also called positive predictive value) is the fraction of relevant instances among the retrieved instances. And recall (also known as sensitivity) is the fraction of relevant instances that have been retrieved over the total amount of relevant instances. Precision and recall are based on an understanding and measure of relevance.

Let us imagine there are 100 positive cases among 10,000 cases. You want to predict which ones are positive, and you pick 200 to have a better chance of catching many of the 100 positive cases. You record the IDs of your predictions, and when you get the actual results you sum up how many times you were right or wrong. There are four ways of being right or wrong:

TN / True Negative: case was negative and predicted negative
TP / True Positive: case was positive and predicted positive
FN / False Negative: case was positive but predicted negative
FP / False Positive: case was negative but predicted positive

Makes sense so far? Now you count how many of the 10,000 cases fall in each bucket, say:

	Predicted Negative	Predicted Positive
Negative Cases	TN: 9,760	FP: 140
Positive Cases	FN: 40	TP: 60

Three main questions on this contingency table or confusion matrix:

What percent of your predictions were correct?
You answer: the “accuracy” was (9,760+60) out of 10,000 = 98.2%
What percent of the positive cases did you catch?
You answer: the “recall” was 60 out of 100 = 60%
What percent of positive predictions were correct?
You answer: the “precision” was 60 out of 200 = 30%

		True condition
	Total population	Condition positive	Condition negative	Prevalence = Σ Condition positive/Σ Total population	Accuracy (ACC) = Σ True positive + Σ True negative/Σ Total population
Predicted condition	Predicted condition positive	True positive, Power	False positive, Type I error	Positive predictive value (PPV), Precision = Σ True positive/Σ Predicted condition positive	False discovery rate (FDR) = Σ False positive/Σ Predicted condition positive
	Predicted condition negative	False negative, Type II error	True negative	False omission rate (FOR) = Σ False negative/Σ Predicted condition negative	Negative predictive value (NPV) = Σ True negative/Σ Predicted condition negative
		True positive rate (TPR), Recall, Sensitivity, probability of detection = Σ True positive/Σ Condition positive	False positive rate (FPR), Fall-out, probability of false alarm = Σ False positive/Σ Condition negative	Positive likelihood ratio (LR+) = TPR/FPR	Diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) = LR+/LR−	F₁ score = 2/1/Recall + 1/Precision

Terminology and derivations
from a confusion matrix
condition positive (P) the number of real positive cases in the data condition negative (N) the number of real negative cases in the data true positive (TP) eqv. with hit true negative (TN) eqv. with correct rejection false positive (FP) eqv. with false alarm, Type I error false negative (FN) eqv. with miss, Type II error sensitivity, recall, hit rate, or true positive rate (TPR) $\mathrm {TPR} ={\frac {\mathrm {TP} }{P}}={\frac {\mathrm {TP} }{\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {FN} }}$ specificity or true negative rate (TNR) $\mathrm {TNR} ={\frac {\mathrm {TN} }{N}}={\frac {\mathrm {TN} }{\mathrm {TN} +\mathrm {FP} }}$ precision or positive predictive value (PPV) $\mathrm {PPV} ={\frac {\mathrm {TP} }{\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {FP} }}$ negative predictive value (NPV) $\mathrm {NPV} ={\frac {\mathrm {TN} }{\mathrm {TN} +\mathrm {FN} }}$ miss rate or false negative rate (FNR) $\mathrm {FNR} ={\frac {\mathrm {FN} }{P}}={\frac {\mathrm {FN} }{\mathrm {FN} +\mathrm {TP} }}=1-\mathrm {TPR}$ fall-out or false positive rate (FPR) $\mathrm {FPR} ={\frac {\mathrm {FP} }{N}}={\frac {\mathrm {FP} }{\mathrm {FP} +\mathrm {TN} }}=1-\mathrm {TNR}$ false discovery rate (FDR) $\mathrm {FDR} ={\frac {\mathrm {FP} }{\mathrm {FP} +\mathrm {TP} }}=1-\mathrm {PPV}$ false omission rate (FOR) $\mathrm {FOR} ={\frac {\mathrm {FN} }{\mathrm {FN} +\mathrm {TN} }}=1-\mathrm {NPV}$ accuracy (ACC) $\mathrm {ACC} ={\frac {\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {TN} }{P+N}}={\frac {\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {TN} }{\mathrm {TP} +\mathrm {TN} +\mathrm {FP} +\mathrm {FN} }}$