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I'm reading a paper and they use the term "discriminative power" in reference to a recognizer for road sign recognition. What exactly is discriminative power?

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    The term "to discriminate" means "to make a distinction"; so discriminative power is a measure of how well a classification algorithm discriminates things (how good it is at distinguishing between and classifying them). There are a couple of methods used to calculate it. That said, this is is off-topic. Also, the question itself shouldn't require people to follow a link to figure out what it's about, so it's OK to have the link, but you should also include the quote, for context. Mar 16, 2020 at 23:11

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A “discriminator” is a mean to make the difference between several categories or classes of items.

The “discriminative power” is a wording to refer to how effective a discriminator works and its ability to categorize correctly an item.

A discriminator can be something as complex as a trained neural net, or as simple as a basic property of the data being classified. For example, the discriminative power of the number of edges is substantial when it comes to categorize different kinds of shapes. But insufficient to make the difference between a square and a rectangle.

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