# How do you make a 3d ROC curve? Stats people -- help! **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 17, 2004, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-make-a-3d-roc-curve-stats-people-help/234872 "2004-03-17T16:54:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![KarmaComa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e36b37/32.png) [@KarmaComa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarmaComa)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2004, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-make-a-3d-roc-curve-stats-people-help/234872/1 "2004-03-17T16:54:10Z")
Ok, so I’ve got this problem. In some work, I’ve got a sample in which entities, let’s call them subjects, are rated positive or negative. The sample of subjects is then filtered by two criteria, resulting in a 3d plot: “aplha cutoff”, “beta cutoff”, and “positive rate”. This is all well and good, but how can I make an ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve from this? Would it have to be either in 4d or using a set of 3d surfaces? Is there an expressable way to do it? I just can’t think… ---
**Author:** ![KarmaComa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e36b37/32.png) [@KarmaComa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarmaComa)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2004, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-make-a-3d-roc-curve-stats-people-help/234872/2 "2004-03-17T17:07:26Z")
Maybe I can get something nice by doing quadrature on a scatter of false pos vs. false neg… does that make sense? ---
**Author:** ![KarmaComa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e36b37/32.png) [@KarmaComa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarmaComa)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2004, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-make-a-3d-roc-curve-stats-people-help/234872/3 "2004-03-18T14:25:50Z")
Thanks for all the help guys! 😃 I’m going with the scatter plot. It looks great, but the damn EPS file is huge.