The Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) is widely used in the fields of bioinformatics and machine learning to evaluate the quality of binary (two-class)
classifications. It is named for biochemist
Brian W. Matthews, who described the measure in a foundational 1975 paper. An equivalent quantity, the Doolittle Measure of Association or Doolittle Skill Score, was used by M. H. Doolittle in the 1880s to rate the accuracy of
meteorologist John Park Finley's
tornado predictions and other
weather forecasts. The coefficient accounts for true and false positives and negatives and is generally regarded as a balanced measure which can be used even if the classes are of very different sizes. The MCC is in essence a correlation coefficient between the observed and predicted binary classifications; it returns a value between −1 and +1. A coefficient of +1 represents a perfect prediction, 0 no better than random prediction and −1 indicates total disagreement between prediction and observation. However, if MCC equals neither −1, 0, or +1, it is not a reliable indicator of how similar a predictor is to random guessing because MCC is dependent on the dataset. MCC is closely related to the
chi-square statistic for a 2×2
contingency table : |\text{MCC}| = \sqrt{\frac{\chi^2}{n}} where
n is the total number of observations. While there is no perfect way of describing the
confusion matrix of true and false positives and negatives by a single number, the Matthews correlation coefficient is generally regarded as being one of the best such measures. Other measures, such as the proportion of correct predictions (also termed
accuracy), are not useful when the two classes are of very different sizes. For example, assigning every object to the larger set achieves a high proportion of correct predictions, but is not generally a useful classification. The MCC can be calculated directly from the
confusion matrix using the formula: : \text{MCC} = \frac{ \mathit{TP} \times \mathit{TN} - \mathit{FP} \times \mathit{FN} } {\sqrt{ (\mathit{TP} + \mathit{FP}) ( \mathit{TP} + \mathit{FN} ) ( \mathit{TN} + \mathit{FP} ) ( \mathit{TN} + \mathit{FN} ) } } In this equation,
TP is the number of
true positives,
TN the number of
true negatives,
FP the number of
false positives and
FN the number of
false negatives. If exactly one of the four sums in the denominator is zero, the denominator can be arbitrarily set to one; this results in a Matthews correlation coefficient of zero, which can be shown to be the correct limiting value. In case two or more sums are zero (e.g. both labels and model predictions are all positive or negative), the limit does not exist. The MCC can be calculated with the formula: : \text{MCC} = \sqrt{\mathit{PPV} \times \mathit{TPR} \times \mathit{TNR} \times \mathit{NPV}} - \sqrt{\mathit{FDR} \times \mathit{FNR} \times \mathit{FPR} \times \mathit{FOR}} using the positive predictive value, the true positive rate, the true negative rate, the negative predictive value, the false discovery rate, the false negative rate, the false positive rate, and the false omission rate. The original formula as given by Matthews was:
Markedness and
informedness correspond to different directions of information flow and generalize
Youden's J statistic, the \delta p statistics, while their geometric mean generalizes the Matthews correlation coefficient to more than two classes. == Example ==