Given a vector of scores and a vector of actual class labels, how do you calculate a single-number AUC metric for a binary classifier in the R language or in simple English?

Page 9 of "AUC: a Better Measure..." seems to require knowing the class labels, and here is an example in MATLAB where I don't understand

R(Actual == 1))​

Because R (not to be confused with the R language) is defined a vector but used as a function?

With the package pROC you can use the function auc() like this example from the help page:

> data(aSAH)
> 
> # Syntax (response, predictor):
> auc(aSAH$outcome, aSAH$s100b)
Area under the curve: 0.7314

Without any additional packages:

true_Y = c(1,1,1,1,2,1,2,1,2,2)
probs = c(1,0.999,0.999,0.973,0.568,0.421,0.382,0.377,0.146,0.11)

getROC_AUC = function(probs, true_Y){
    probsSort = sort(probs, decreasing = TRUE, index.return = TRUE)
    val = unlist(probsSort$x)
    idx = unlist(probsSort$ix)  

    roc_y = true_Y[idx];
    stack_x = cumsum(roc_y == 2)/sum(roc_y == 2)
    stack_y = cumsum(roc_y == 1)/sum(roc_y == 1)    

    auc = sum((stack_x[2:length(roc_y)]-stack_x[1:length(roc_y)-1])*stack_y[2:length(roc_y)])
    return(list(stack_x=stack_x, stack_y=stack_y, auc=auc))
}

aList = getROC_AUC(probs, true_Y) 

stack_x = unlist(aList$stack_x)
stack_y = unlist(aList$stack_y)
auc = unlist(aList$auc)

plot(stack_x, stack_y, type = "l", col = "blue", xlab = "False Positive Rate", ylab = "True Positive Rate", main = "ROC")
axis(1, seq(0.0,1.0,0.1))
axis(2, seq(0.0,1.0,0.1))
abline(h=seq(0.0,1.0,0.1), v=seq(0.0,1.0,0.1), col="gray", lty=3)
legend(0.7, 0.3, sprintf("%3.3f",auc), lty=c(1,1), lwd=c(2.5,2.5), col="blue", title = "AUC")

I found some of the solutions here to be slow and/or confusing (and some of them don't handle ties correctly)  I found  data.table based function auc_roc() in  R package mltools.

library(data.table)
library(mltools)

preds <- c(.1, .3, .3, .9)
actuals <- c(0, 0, 1, 1)

auc_roc(preds, actuals)  # 0.875

auc_roc(preds, actuals, returnDT=TRUE)
   Pred CountFalse CountTrue CumulativeFPR CumulativeTPR AdditionalArea CumulativeArea
1:  0.9          0         1           0.0           0.5          0.000          0.000
2:  0.3          1         1           0.5           1.0          0.375          0.375
3:  0.1          1         0           1.0           1.0          0.500          0.875

The ROCR package will calculate the AUC among other statistics:

auc.tmp <- performance(pred,"auc"); auc <- as.numeric(auc.tmp@y.values)

Currently top voted answer is incorrect, because it disregards ties. When positive and negative scores are equal, then AUC should be 0.5. Below is corrected example.

computeAUC <- function(pos.scores, neg.scores, n_sample=100000) {
  # Args:
  #   pos.scores: scores of positive observations
  #   neg.scores: scores of negative observations
  #   n_samples : number of samples to approximate AUC

  pos.sample <- sample(pos.scores, n_sample, replace=T)
  neg.sample <- sample(neg.scores, n_sample, replace=T)
  mean(1.0*(pos.sample > neg.sample) + 0.5*(pos.sample==neg.sample))
}