Question 1
Q1A data scientist is developing a model to predict equipment failure in a manufacturing plant. The dataset contains sensor readings and is heavily imbalanced, with failure events representing only 0.5% of the data. The business priority is to identify as many potential failures as possible, even if it means some non-failures are incorrectly flagged. Which evaluation metric should be prioritized for model optimization?
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Correct answer: C
Recall, also known as Sensitivity or True Positive Rate, measures the proportion of actual positives that were correctly identified. In this scenario, the cost of missing a potential failure (a False Negative) is very high. Therefore, the primary goal is to maximize the number of true failures caught by the model, which is precisely what Recall measures. Accuracy would be misleadingly high due to the class imbalance. Precision focuses on the proportion of positive predictions that are actually correct, which is less critical here than catching all potential failures.