Wow, that definition is counter-intuitive. Ive expected the false-positive-rate to be the number of false positives divided by the number of all positives. Isn't it how "rates" are usually defined? No wonder everybody is confused.
I think it's a perspective thing. You are looking at the rate of false results, so given a particular type of input what rate do you get it right? For negative ground truth your possible outputs are "false (positive)" and "true (negative)".
I agree it can be confusing, but I think people would also make the opposite mistake if it were defined differently.
