thesis/introduction thesis/introduction

Chapter 1 of the BGU MSc thesis on ROLL. Written last, after Ch. 2–4 are stable. Parent: thesis

Target length: 4–6 pages
Write last — contributions list and roadmap must match what the thesis actually delivers
Structure: Hook → Problem statement → Contributions → Roadmap
Do NOT explain the method — introduction is a promise, not a delivery

Hook (~1–2 paragraphs) — concrete application where a wrong operating point is costly. Candidates from existing prose: medical screening, fraud detection, astronomy/microscopy pipelines. Make the reader feel the problem before naming it.
Problem statement (~1 paragraph) — class imbalance + why accuracy is the wrong metric + the TPR@FPR objective in one crisp sentence.
Contributions (bulleted list, ~5 items) — what ROLL does that prior work does not:
- Differentiable TPR@FPR loss (and FPR@TPR by label/score symmetry)
- Gaussian, Beta, KDE instantiations with closed-form gradients
- Gradient-balance property (updates independent of class-size ratio)
- Gradient-locality property (threshold-focused gradient mass)
- Empirical evaluation on KEEL benchmark + larger datasets
Roadmap (~1 paragraph) — one sentence per chapter, matching final chapter titles exactly.

Roadmap must exactly match final chapter titles — write it last
Don't use the inseparability / cascade-classifier tangent from the old draft; it dilutes the argument