Please explain "confidence" parameter in errors

Development
1

Hi guys,
here is an example: (I am using “picky” level)
"Access to clean and safe drinking water is a fundamental human right. "

but the system reports with confidence 0.8 that there should be a comma before “and”

   "rule": {
        "id": "COMMA_COMPOUND_SENTENCE_2",
        "subId": "4",
        "sourceFile": "grammar.xml",
        "description": "comma between independent clauses",
        "issueType": "uncategorized",
        "urls": [
          {
            "value": "https://languagetool.org/insights/post/types-of-sentences/#compound-sentence"
          }
        ],
        "category": {
          "id": "PUNCTUATION",
          "name": "Punctuation"
        },
        "isPremium": false,
        "confidence": 0.81
      },
      "ignoreForIncompleteSentence": true,
      "contextForSureMatch": -1
    }

I would like to avoid these kind of false positive. Can I rely on confidence parameter and filter errors by it? And what threshold would you recommend? 0.9?

2

Hi, the confidence is experimental and shouldn’t be used for this. But thanks for the report, I’ve forwarded it to our developers.

3

Thank you @dnaber for your reply. Just wanted to ask in general how to avoid false positives - if there any other parameter we can use? or maybe there is a list of rules which are “problematic” and have issues for being false-positive?

Also the strict picky level - does it have any influence on these false-positive errors?

4

Sorry, I don’t think there’s an easy way to turn off just the false positives. Picky level generally gives you more complaints, often style-related ones, which some users might consider false positives in a way.