AI engineering glossary · Evaluation metrics
What is Partial AUC?
Partial AUC (also called pAUC): The area under only a chosen portion of the ROC curve, typically a low false-positive-rate range, rather than the whole curve. It focuses evaluation on the operating region that matters in practice, since a model can have a good full AUC yet perform badly where false alarms must be rare.
Partial AUC: an example
A screening tool must keep false positives under 5%, so the team computes the area under the ROC curve only for FPR between 0 and 0.05.
Related terms
More Evaluation metrics terms
- pass@k
- Perplexity
- Pinball loss
- Platt scaling
- Precision at k
- Precision-recall break-even point
- Precision-recall curve
- Precision-recall trade-off
Where you learn it
Partial AUC is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.