A dimensional R2 regression metric
Abstract
R2 score is the standard metric for evaluating regression tasks, offering a normalized magnitude-agnostic measure of accuracy that captures variance. However, R2 has three key limitations: it is limited to at most two dimensional inputs, it reduces the score to a single scalar that hides rich patterns of prediction accuracy, and it is sensitive to low-variance noise channels which can yield large, uninterpretable negative values. We introduce the Dimensional R2 score (Dim-R2), a simple extension of R2 that accepts data of arbitrary dimensionality, provides a multidimensional view of accuracy, and reduces sensitivity to noise. We demonstrate its advantages on both synthetic sinusoidal data and three multidimensional regression datasets. Dim-R2 offers an interpretable and flexible metric that highlights patterns in regression accuracy, guiding regression modeling.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.01066,
title = {A dimensional R2 regression metric},
author = {Jaesung Yoo and Stefan Lemke and Jian Zhong Guo and Kanaka Rajan and Adam Hantman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01066},
year = {2026}
}