A sarcasm-detection model was trained on 80,000 text messages: 40,000 messages sent by adults (18 years and older) and 40,000 messages sent by minors (less than 18 years old). The model was then evaluated on a test set of 20,000 messages: 10,000 from adults and 10,000 from minors. The following confusion matrices show the results for each group (a positive prediction signifies a classification of "sarcastic"; a negative prediction signifies a classificaton of "not sarcastic"):
Adults
True Positives (TPs): 512 | False Positives (FPs): 51 |
False Negatives (FNs): 36 | True Negatives (TNs): 9401 |
$$\text{Precision} = \frac{TP}{TP+FP} = 0.909$$ | |
$$\text{Recall} = \frac{TP}{TP+FN} = 0.934$$ |
Minors
True Positives (TPs): 2147 | False Positives (FPs): 96 |
False Negatives (FNs): 2177 | True Negatives (TNs): 5580 |
$$\text{Precision} = \frac{TP}{TP+FP} = 0.957$$ | |
$$\text{Recall} = \frac{TP}{TP+FN} = 0.497$$ |
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The model achieves both precision and recall rates over 90% when detecting sarcasm in text messages from adults.
While the model achieves a slightly higher precision rate for minors than adults, the recall rate is substantially lower for minors, resulting in less reliable predictions for this group.
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The model performs well on text messages from adults (with precision and recall rates both above 90%), so restricting its use to this group will sidestep the systematic errors in classifying minors' text messages.
The precision rate for text messages sent by minors is high, which means that when the model predicts "sarcastic" for this group, it is nearly always correct.
The problem is that recall is very low for minors; The model fails to identify sarcasm in approximately 50% of examples. Given that the model's negative predictions for minors are no better than random guesses, we can avoid these errors by not providing a prediction in these cases.
The systematic errors in this model are specific to text messages sent by minors. Restricting the model's use to the group more susceptible to error would not help.
Always predicting "sarcastic" for minors' text messages would increase the recall rate from 0.497 to 1.0, as the model would no longer fail to identify any messages as sarcastic. However, this increase in recall would come at the expense of precision. All the true negatives would be changed to false positives:
True Positives (TPs): 4324 | False Positives (FPs): 5676 |
False Negatives (FNs): 0 | True Negatives (TNs): 0 |
which would decrease the precision rate from 0.957 to 0.432. So, adding this calibration would change the type of error but would not mitigate the magnitude of the error.