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Question 951 of 1,672
ModelingmediumMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped

MLS-C01 Modeling Practice Question

A data scientist is training a binary classification model on imbalanced data (95% negative, 5% positive). The model achieves 99% accuracy on the test set but fails to detect any positive cases. Which metric should the scientist focus on to evaluate model performance?

Answer choices

Why each option matters

Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.

Correct answer & explanation

Recall

Recall (true positive rate) measures the ability to find all positive samples, which is critical for imbalanced datasets where accuracy can be misleading. Option A is wrong because accuracy is high but misleading in imbalanced data. Option C is wrong because RMSE is a regression metric, not suitable for classification. Option D is wrong because precision focuses on the accuracy of positive predictions but does not capture missed positives; recall is more important for detecting all positive cases.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

  • Accuracy

    Why it's wrong here

    Accuracy is high but misleading due to class imbalance.

  • Recall

    Why this is correct

    Recall measures the proportion of actual positives correctly identified.

  • RMSE

    Why it's wrong here

    RMSE is for regression, not classification.

  • Precision

    Why it's wrong here

    Precision is relevant but does not account for false negatives.

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Last reviewed: Jun 20, 2026

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