How To Measure ML Model Accuracy

Machine learning (ML) is about making predictions about new data based on old data. The quality of any machine-learning algorithm is ultimately determined by the quality of those predictions. However, there is no one universal way to measure that quality across all ML applications, and that has broad implications for the value and usefulness of machine learning. "Every industry, every domain, every application has different care-abouts," said Nick Ni, director of product marketing, AI and software at Xilinx. "And you have to measure that care-about." Classification is the most familiar application, and "accuracy" is the measure used for it. But even so, there remain disagreements about exactly how accuracy should be measured or what it should mean. With other applications, it's much less clear how to measure the quality of results.