This paper utilizes a new concept, called Buffered Probability of Exceedance (bPOE), to introduce an alternative to the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) performance metric called Buffered AUC (bAUC). Central to the creation of bAUC is a new technique for calculation and optimization of bPOE. We show this formula to be easily integrable into optimization frameworks, o...