RECEIVER OPERATING CURVE

ALSO CALLED RECEIVER OPERATING CHARACTERISTIC CURVE AND ALWAYS ABBREVIATED ROC

There is a lovely web site that explains this in detail. http://www.anaesthetist.com/mnm/stats/roc/

A ROC plot is obtained by plotting all sensitivity values (true positive fraction) on the y axis against their equivalent (1 - specificity) values (false positive fraction) for all available thresholds on the x axis, as in the example shown below. The example concerns predicting locations that contain an eagle nest.

The area under the ROC function (AUC) is usually taken to be an important index because it provides a single measure of overall accuracy