score
What It Means
A score is the raw numerical output that an AI model produces before making a final decision. Think of it as the model's confidence level or probability - like giving something a rating between 0 and 100 - before the system decides whether to approve, reject, or categorize something.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
Scores give you control over how aggressive or conservative your AI decisions are by adjusting the threshold where you draw the line between approve/reject. This directly impacts business outcomes - setting the threshold too low might approve too many risky loans, while too high might reject good customers. Understanding scores also helps explain AI decisions to regulators and stakeholders.
Real-World Example
A fraud detection system gives each transaction a score from 0-1000, where higher numbers indicate more suspicious activity. Your bank currently flags anything above 750 for review, but you could lower it to 600 to catch more fraud (with more false alarms) or raise it to 850 to reduce manual reviews (but miss some fraud).
Common Confusion
People often think the final yes/no decision from AI is all that matters, but the underlying score is actually more valuable because it shows how confident the model is and can be adjusted for different business needs without retraining the entire model.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare AI, scores represent the numerical confidence levels that diagnostic or predictive models assign to clinic...
Finance: In finance, scores typically refer to risk assessment outputs from AI models, such as credit scores (0-850 range), proba...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"A continuous value output from a classifier. Applying a threshold to a score results in a predicted label."Source: AI_Fairness_360
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