Explain it like fishing with a net. You use a wide net, and catch 80 of 100 total fish in a lake. That's 80% recall. But you also get 80 rocks in

I just explained recall/precision to a non-DS, and he got it immediately : datascience

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2021-10-24 01:30:06

Explain it like fishing with a net. You use a wide net, and catch 80 of 100 total fish in a lake. That's 80% recall. But you also get 80 rocks in your net. That means 50% precision, half of the net's contents is junk. You could use a smaller net and target one pocket of the lake where there are lots of fish and no rocks, but you might only get 20 of the fish in order to get 0 rocks. That is 20% recall and 100% precision.

Seriously, it made me so happy since I've butted against this for years. Equations make people's eyes glaze over, but my PM understood this immediately over a voice call, without diagrams or anything.

My mentor once told me that most statistical concepts are best explained by an analogy - the tricky bit is, there are lots of terrible analogies

If you can't explain what your process is doing in English a toddler can understand, there's no guarantee you've actually addressed the business's brief and I suspect some of us hand-wave away questions with big words and/or notation to paper over a lack of thorough understanding.

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