Curve Ball for Rare Classes

You're comparing two classifiers on a dataset where only 2% of examples belong to the positive class. Why would a practitioner generally prefer a precision-recall (PR) curve over a ROC curve to evaluate performance on the rare positive class?

A

ROC curves require the positive and negative classes to be equal in size by definition

B

Precision depends only on true positives and false positives, so a PR curve exposes wrong positive predictions directly, whereas the ROC curve's false positive rate is diluted by the huge pool of true negatives and can look optimistic under heavy imbalance

C

ROC curves cannot be computed when classes are imbalanced

D

PR curves and ROC curves always produce identical rankings of classifiers, so the choice never matters