Equation 5 · How AI and Cybersecurity Actually Work
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What the article says around this equation
When p is small, which it almost always is for genuine, successful misuse against a well-defended system, precision collapses toward zero even for a detector with a very low false-positive rate, simply because the pool of benign traffic the false-positive rate applies to is so much larger than the pool of real events. Why this is worth stating formally rather than just asserting “false positives are a problem” : it shows that a headline detection accuracy figure (say, 99% true-positive rate) is close to meaningless on its own without the base rate and the false-positive rate reported alongside it, and it is exactly the kind of quantity a vendor claim can omit while still being technically…
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When p is small, which it almost always is for genuine, successful misuse against a well-defended system, precision collapses toward zero even for a detector with a very low false-positive rate, simply because the pool of benign traffic the false-positive rate applies to is so much larger than the pool of real events. Why this is worth stating formally rather than just asserting “false positives are a problem” : it shows that a headline detection accuracy figure (say, 99% true-positive rate) is close to meaningless on its own without the base rate and the false-positive rate reported alongside it, and it is exactly the kind of quantity a vendor claim can omit while still being technically accurate.
For background, read the article’s source list.