Calculate AUC in R?

As mentioned by others, you can compute the AUC using the ROCR package. With the ROCR package you can also plot the ROC curve, lift curve and other model selection measures.

You can compute the AUC directly without using any package by using the fact that the AUC is equal to the probability that a true positive is scored greater than a true negative.

For example, if pos.scores is a vector containing a score of the positive examples, and neg.scores is a vector containing the negative examples then the AUC is approximated by:

> mean(sample(pos.scores,1000,replace=T) > sample(neg.scores,1000,replace=T))
[1] 0.7261

will give an approximation of the AUC. You can also estimate the variance of the AUC by bootstrapping:

> aucs = replicate(1000,mean(sample(pos.scores,1000,replace=T) > sample(neg.scores,1000,replace=T)))

With the package pROC you can use the function auc() like this example from the help page:

> data(aSAH)
> 
> # Syntax (response, predictor):
> auc(aSAH$outcome, aSAH$s100b)
Area under the curve: 0.7314

The ROCR package will calculate the AUC among other statistics:

auc.tmp <- performance(pred,"auc"); auc <- as.numeric([email protected])