Using a Binary Classification Approach to Assess the Accuracy of Hand Posture and Force Estimation with Machine Learning Models

Recent studies have successfully reported the accuracy of using artificial neural networks to predict grip force in controlled settings. However, only relying on accuracy to evaluate the machine learning models may lead to overoptimistic results, especially on imbalanced datasets. The Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) showed an advantage in capturing all the data characteristics in the confusion matrix. Therefore, a binary classification approach and the MCC value were introduced to assess the performance of previously proposed machine learning models. Our results show that the overall correlations ranging between 0.48 and 0.59 indicate a strong relationship between predictions and actual scenarios. The binary classification approach and the MCC values could be used for future performance comparison with other machine learning models.