I have the following data:
# actual value:
a <- c(26.77814,29.34224,10.39203,29.66659,20.79306,20.73860,22.71488,29.93678,10.14384,32.63233,24.82544,38.14778,25.12343,23.07767,14.60789)
# predicted value
p <- c(27.238142,27.492240,13.542026,32.266587,20.473063,20.508603,21.414882,28.536775,18.313844,32.082333,24.545438,30.877776,25.703430,22.397666,15.627892)
I already calculated MSE and RMSE for these two, but they're asking for AUC and ROC curve. How can I calculate it from this data using R? I thought AUC is for classification problems, was I mistaken? Can we still calculate AUC for numeric values like above?
Question:
I thought AUC is for classification problems, was I mistaken?
You are not mistaken. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve can't be computed for two numeric vectors like in your example. It's used to determine how well your binary classifier stands up to a gold standard binary classifier. You need a vector of cases vs. controls, or levels for the a vector that put each value in one of two categories.
Here's an example of how you'd do this with the pROC package:
library(pROC)
# actual value
a <- c(26.77814,29.34224,10.39203,29.66659,20.79306,20.73860,22.71488,29.93678,10.14384,32.63233,24.82544,38.14778,25.12343,23.07767,14.60789)
# predicted value
p <- c(27.238142,27.492240,13.542026,32.266587,20.473063,20.508603,21.414882,28.536775,18.313844,32.082333,24.545438,30.877776,25.703430,22.397666,15.627892)
df <- data.frame(a = a, p = p)
# order the data frame according to the actual values
odf <- df[order(df$a),]
# convert the actual values to an ordered binary classification
odf$a <- odf$a > 12 # arbitrarily decided to use 12 as the threshold
# construct the roc object
roc_obj <- roc(odf$a, odf$p)
auc(roc_obj)
# Area under the curve: 0.9615
Here, we have arbitrarily decided that threshold for the gold standard (a) is 12. If that's the case, than observations that have a lower value than 12 are controls. The prediction (p) classifies very well, with an AUC of 0.9615. We don't have to decide on the threshold for our prediction classifier in order to determine the AUC, because it's independent of the threshold decision. We can slide up and down depending on whether it's more important to find cases or to not misclassify a control.
I completely made up the threshold for the gold standard classifier. If you choose a different threshold (for the gold standard), you'll get a different AUC. For example, if we chose 28, the AUC would be 1. The AUC is independent of the threshold for the predictor, but absolutely depends on the threshold for the gold standard.
To clarify the above note, which was apparently misunderstood, you were not mistaken. This kind of analysis is for classification problems. You cannot use it here without more information. In order to do it, you need a threshold for your a vector, which you don't have. You CAN'T make one up and expect to get a non made up result for the AUC. Because the AUC depends on the threshold for the gold standard classifier, if you just make up the threshold, as we did in the exercise above, you are also just making up the AUC.