Most classification problems deal with imbalanced datasets. Examples include telecom churn, employee attrition, cancer prediction, fraud detection, online advertisement targeting, and so on. In all these problems, the number of the positive classes will be very low when compared to the negative classes. In some cases, it is common to have positive classes that are less than 1% of the total sample. In such cases, an accuracy of 99% may sound very good but, in reality, it may not be.
Here, the negatives are 99%, and hence, the baseline will remain the same. If the algorithms predict all the instances as negative, then also the accuracy will be 99%. In this case, all the positives will be predicted wrongly, which is very important for any business. Even though all the positives are predicted wrongly, an accuracy of 99% is achieved. So, the baseline is very important, and the algorithm needs to be evaluated relative to the baseline.