What Is the Naive Classifier for Each Imbalanced Classification Metric?

A common mistake made by beginners is to apply machine learning algorithms to a problem without establishing a performance baseline. A performance baseline provides a minimum score above which a model is considered to have skill on the dataset. It also provides a point of relative improvement for all models evaluated on the dataset. A baseline can be established using a naive classifier, such as predicting one class label for all examples in the test dataset. Another common mistake made by beginners is using classification accuracy as a performance metric on problems that have an imbalanced class distribution.