In this paper we propose a novel data-level algorithm for handling data imbalance in the classification task, Synthetic Majority Undersampling Technique (SMUTE). SMUTE leverages the concept of interpolation of nearby instances, previously introduced in the oversampling setting in SMOTE. Furthermore, we combine both in the Combined Synthetic Oversampling and Undersampling Technique (CSMOUTE), which integrates SMOTE oversampling with SMUTE undersampling. The results of the conducted experimental study demonstrate the usefulness of both the SMUTE and the CSMOUTE algorithms, especially when combined with more complex classifiers, namely MLP and SVM, and when applied on datasets consisting of a large number of outliers. This leads us to a conclusion that the proposed approach shows promise for further extensions accommodating local data characteristics, a direction discussed in more detail in the paper.
Data imbalance remains one of the most widespread problems affecting contemporary machine learning. The negative effect data imbalance can have on the traditional learning algorithms is most severe in combination with other dataset difficulty factors, such as small disjuncts, presence of outliers and insufficient number of training observations. Aforementioned difficulty factors can also limit the applicability of some of the methods of dealing with data imbalance, in particular the neighborhood-based oversampling algorithms based on SMOTE. Radial-Based Oversampling (RBO) was previously propos…
Efficient Hybrid Oversampling and Intelligent Undersampling for Imbalanced Big Data Classification
Universidad de los Andes（洛斯安第斯大学）；Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Aplicadas（工程与应用科学学院）；Instituto Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería (ISCI)（工程复杂系统研究所）；School of Economics and Business（经济与商业学院）；University of Chile（智利大学）
We aim at developing and improving the imbalanced business risk modeling via jointly using proper evaluation criteria, resampling, cross-validation, classifier regularization, and ensembling techniques. Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC of ROC) is used for model comparison based on 10-fold cross validation. Two undersampling strategies including random undersampling (RUS) and cluster centroid undersampling (CCUS), as well as two oversampling methods including random oversampling (ROS) and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), are applied. Three highly int…
Institute of Computer Science（计算机科学研究所）；University of the Philippines Los Baños（菲律宾大学洛斯巴诺斯分校）
This paper presents the performance of a classifier built using the stackingC algorithm in nine different data sets. Each data set is generated using a sampling technique applied on the original imbalanced data set. Five new sampling techniques are proposed in this paper (i.e., SMOTERandRep, Lax Random Oversampling, Lax Random Undersampling, Combined-Lax Random Oversampling Undersampling, and Combined-Lax Random Undersampling Oversampling) that were based on the three sampling techniques (i.e., Random Undersampling, Random Oversampling, and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) usually us…
United International University（联合国际大学）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
Class imbalance problem is commonly faced while developing machine learning models for real-life issues. Due to this problem, the fitted model tends to be biased towards the majority class data, which leads to lower precision, recall, AUC, F1, G-mean score. Several researches have been done to tackle this problem, most of which employed resampling, i.e. oversampling and undersampling techniques to bring the required balance in the data. In this paper, we propose neural network based algorithms for undersampling. Then we resampled several class imbalanced data using our algorithms and also some…
The problem of class imbalance along with class-overlapping has become a major issue in the domain of supervised learning. Most supervised learning algorithms assume equal cardinality of the classes under consideration while optimizing the cost function and this assumption does not hold true for imbalanced datasets which results in sub-optimal classification. Therefore, various approaches, such as undersampling, oversampling, cost-sensitive learning and ensemble based methods have been proposed for dealing with imbalanced datasets. However, undersampling suffers from information loss, oversamp…
Data imbalance remains one of the open challenges in the contemporary machine learning. It is especially prevalent in case of medical data, such as histopathological images. Traditional data-level approaches for dealing with data imbalance are ill-suited for image data: oversampling methods such as SMOTE and its derivatives lead to creation of unrealistic synthetic observations, whereas undersampling reduces the amount of available data, critical for successful training of convolutional neural networks. To alleviate the problems associated with over- and undersampling we propose a novel two-st…
University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
In practice, machine learning experts are often confronted with imbalanced data. Without accounting for the imbalance, common classifiers perform poorly and standard evaluation metrics mislead the practitioners on the model's performance. A common method to treat imbalanced datasets is under- and oversampling. In this process, samples are either removed from the majority class or synthetic samples are added to the minority class. In this paper, we follow up on recent developments in deep learning. We take proposals of deep generative models, including our own, and study the ability of these ap…
The special and important problems of default prediction for municipal bonds are addressed using a combination of text embeddings from a pre-trained transformer network, a fully connected neural network, and synthetic oversampling. The combination of these techniques provides significant improvement in performance over human estimates, linear models, and boosted ensemble models, on data with extreme imbalance. Less than 0.2% of municipal bonds default, but our technique predicts 9 out of 10 defaults at the time of issue, without using bond ratings, at a cost of false positives on less than 0.1…
Duke University School of Medicine（杜克大学医学院）；Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)（皇家理工学院（KTH））；Duke University（杜克大学）
In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of class imbalance on classification performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and compare frequently used methods to address the issue. Class imbalance is a common problem that has been comprehensively studied in classical machine learning, yet very limited systematic research is available in the context of deep learning. In our study, we use three benchmark datasets of increasing complexity, MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, to investigate the effects of imbalance on classification and perform an extensive comparison of several me…
A Machine Learning Framework for Handling Unreliable Absence Label and Class Imbalance for Marine Stinger Beaching Prediction
Transitional Artificial Intelligence Research Group, School of Mathematics and Statistics（过渡人工智能研究组与数学与统计学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics（数学与统计学院）；Center for Marine Science and Innovation（海洋科学与创新中心）
Machine learning has automated much of financial fraud detection, notifying firms of, or even blocking, questionable transactions instantly. However, data imbalance starves traditionally trained models of the content necessary to detect fraud. This study examines three separate factors of credit card fraud detection via machine learning. First, it assesses the potential for different sampling methods, undersampling and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), to improve algorithm performance in data-starved environments. Additionally, five industry-practical machine learning algorith…
University of Oklahoma（俄克拉荷马大学）；Islamic University（伊斯兰大学）
Class imbalance in a dataset is one of the major challenges that can significantly impact the performance of machine learning models resulting in biased predictions. Numerous techniques have been proposed to address class imbalanced problems, including, but not limited to, Oversampling, Undersampling, and cost-sensitive approaches. Due to its ability to generate synthetic data, oversampling techniques such as the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is among the most widely used methodology by researchers. However, one of SMOTE's potential disadvantages is that newly created minor…
A Systematic Evaluation of Imbalance Handling Methods in Biomedical Binary Classification
Institute for Health Informatics, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学健康信息学研究所）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学计算机科学与工程系）；School of Statistics, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学统计学系）；Division of Computational Health Sciences, Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学外科系计算健康科学分会）
EvoSampling: A Granular Ball-based Evolutionary Hybrid Sampling with Knowledge Transfer for Imbalanced Learning
School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Key Laboratory of Social Computing and Cognitive Intelligence (Dalian University of Technology), Ministry of Education（社会计算与认知智能重点实验室（大连理工大学））；School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学工程与计算机科学学院）；Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学计算机科学系）
Cisco Systems, Inc.（思科系统公司）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；Charles University（查理大学）
Severe class imbalance is one of the main conditions that make machine learning in cybersecurity difficult. A variety of dataset preprocessing methods have been introduced over the years. These methods modify the training dataset by oversampling, undersampling or a combination of both to improve the predictive performance of classifiers trained on this dataset. Although these methods are used in cybersecurity occasionally, a comprehensive, unbiased benchmark comparing their performance over a variety of cybersecurity problems is missing. This paper presents a benchmark of 16 preprocessing meth…
By leveraging deep learning to automatically classify camera trap images, ecologists can monitor biodiversity conservation efforts and the effects of climate change on ecosystems more efficiently. Due to the imbalanced class-distribution of camera trap datasets, current models are biased towards the majority classes. As a result, they obtain good performance for a few majority classes but poor performance for many minority classes. We used two-phase training to increase the performance for these minority classes. We trained, next to a baseline model, four models that implemented a different ve…
Class flipping for uplift modeling and Heterogeneous Treatment Effect estimation on imbalanced RCT data
Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院计算机科学研究所）；Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science, Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学数学与信息科学学院）
University of Birjand（比尔詹德大学）；Islamic Azad University（伊斯兰阿扎德大学）；Fasa University（法萨大学）；Luleå University of Technology（吕勒奥理工大学）；Dibrugarh University（迪布鲁格尔大学）
Imbalanced Data (ID) is a problem that deters Machine Learning (ML) models for achieving satisfactory results. ID is the occurrence of a situation where the quantity of the samples belonging to one class outnumbers that of the other by a wide margin, making such models learning process biased towards the majority class. In recent years, to address this issue, several solutions have been put forward, which opt for either synthetically generating new data for the minority class or reducing the number of majority classes for balancing the data. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the effectivene…
This paper looks into the problem of handling imbalanced data in a multi-label classification problem. The problem is solved by proposing two novel methods that primarily exploit the geometric relationship between the feature vectors. The first one is an undersampling algorithm that uses angle between feature vectors to select more informative samples while rejecting the less informative ones. A suitable criterion is proposed to define the informativeness of a given sample. The second one is an oversampling algorithm that uses a generative algorithm to create new synthetic data that respects a…
One of the limiting factors in training data-driven, rare-event prediction algorithms is the scarcity of the events of interest resulting in an extreme imbalance in the data. There have been many methods introduced in the literature for overcoming this issue; simple data manipulation through undersampling and oversampling, utilizing cost-sensitive learning algorithms, or by generating synthetic data points following the distribution of the existing data. While synthetic data generation has recently received a great deal of attention, there are real challenges involved in doing so for high-dime…
Islamic University of Technology（伊斯兰技术大学）；Robi Axiata Limited（Robi Axiata有限公司）
Class imbalance is a frequently occurring scenario in classification tasks. Learning from imbalanced data poses a major challenge, which has instigated a lot of research in this area. Data preprocessing using sampling techniques is a standard approach to deal with the imbalance present in the data. Since standard classification algorithms do not perform well on imbalanced data, the dataset needs to be adequately balanced before training. This can be accomplished by oversampling the minority class or undersampling the majority class. In this study, a novel hybrid sampling algorithm has been pro…
University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；University of Jaén（哈恩大学）；King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）
The learning from imbalanced data is a deeply studied problem in standard classification and, in recent times, also in multilabel classification. A handful of multilabel resampling methods have been proposed in late years, aiming to balance the labels distribution. However these methods have to face a new obstacle, specific for multilabel data, as is the joint appearance of minority and majority labels in the same data patterns. We proposed recently a new algorithm designed to decouple imbalanced labels concurring in the same instance, called REMEDIAL (\textit{REsampling MultilabEl datasets by…
In the last decade, machine learning-based approaches became capable of performing a wide range of complex tasks sometimes better than humans, demanding a fraction of the time. Such an advance is partially due to the exponential growth in the amount of data available, which makes it possible to extract trustworthy real-world information from them. However, such data is generally imbalanced since some phenomena are more likely than others. Such a behavior yields considerable influence on the machine learning model's performance since it becomes biased on the more frequent data it receives. Desp…
Sampling Imbalanced Data with Multi-objective Bilevel Optimization
Department of Mathematics University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校数学系）；Mathematics and Computer Sciences Division Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室数学与计算机科学 division）
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；MIT Sloan Neuroeconomics Lab（麻省理工学院斯隆神经经济学实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Class imbalance presents a major hurdle in the application of data mining methods. A common practice to deal with it is to create ensembles of classifiers that learn from resampled balanced data. For example, bagged decision trees combined with random undersampling (RUS) or the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). However, most of the resampling methods entail asymmetric changes to the examples of different classes, which in turn can introduce its own biases in the model. Furthermore, those methods require a performance measure to be specified a priori before learning. An alterna…
Swinburne University of Technology（斯威本科技大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Biomedical data are widely accepted in developing prediction models for identifying a specific tumor, drug discovery and classification of human cancers. However, previous studies usually focused on different classifiers, and overlook the class imbalance problem in real-world biomedical datasets. There are a lack of studies on evaluation of data pre-processing techniques, such as resampling and feature selection, on imbalanced biomedical data learning. The relationship between data pre-processing techniques and the data distributions has never been analysed in previous studies. This article ma…
In many application domains such as medicine, information retrieval, cybersecurity, social media, etc., datasets used for inducing classification models often have an unequal distribution of the instances of each class. This situation, known as imbalanced data classification, causes low predictive performance for the minority class examples. Thus, the prediction model is unreliable although the overall model accuracy can be acceptable. Oversampling and undersampling techniques are well-known strategies to deal with this problem by balancing the number of examples of each class. However, their …
Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques
Department of Information Systems and Security, College of Information Technology and Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, United Arab Emirates University（信息系统与安全系，信息技术学院和人工智能与数字创新中心，阿联酋大学）；College of Engineering and Technology, American University of the Middle East（工程与技术学院，中东大学）
