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 approaches to provide realistic samples that improve performance on imbalanced classification tasks via oversampling.
Across 160K+ experiments, we show that all of the new methods tend to perform better than simple baseline methods such as SMOTE, but require different under- and oversampling ratios to do so. Our experiments show that the way the method of sampling does not affect quality, but runtime varies widely. We also observe that the improvements in terms of performance metric, while shown to be significant when ranking the methods, often are minor in absolute terms, especially compared to the required effort. Furthermore, we notice that a large part of the improvement is due to undersampling, not oversampling. We make our code and testing framework available.
A key challenge of oversampling in imbalanced classification is that the generation of new minority samples often neglects the usage of majority classes, resulting in most new minority sampling spreading the whole minority space. In view of this, we present a new oversampling framework based on the counterfactual theory. Our framework introduces a counterfactual objective by leveraging the rich inherent information of majority classes and explicitly perturbing majority samples to generate new samples in the territory of minority space. It can be analytically shown that the new minority samples…
Data-driven fault diagnostics and prognostics suffers from class-imbalance problem in industrial systems and it raises challenges to common machine learning algorithms as it becomes difficult to learn the features of the minority class samples. Synthetic oversampling methods are commonly used to tackle these problems by generating the minority class samples to balance the distributions between majority and minority classes. However, many of oversampling methods are inappropriate that they cannot generate effective and useful minority class samples according to different distributions of data, …
Classification of imbalanced data is one of the common problems in the recent field of data mining. Imbalanced data substantially affects the performance of standard classification models. Data-level approaches mainly use the oversampling methods to solve the problem, such as synthetic minority oversampling Technique (SMOTE). However, since the methods such as SMOTE generate instances by linear interpolation, synthetic data space may look like a polygonal. Also, the oversampling methods generate outliers of the minority class. In this paper, we proposed Gaussian based minority oversampling tec…
College of Information Science and Technology（信息科学技术学院）；Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学）
Imbalanced Learning is an important learning algorithm for the classification models, which have enjoyed much popularity on many applications. Typically, imbalanced learning algorithms can be partitioned into two types, i.e., data level approaches and algorithm level approaches. In this paper, the focus is to develop a robust synthetic minority oversampling technique which falls the umbrella of data level approaches. On one hand, we proposed a method to generate synthetic samples in a high dimensional feature space, instead of a linear sampling space. On the other hand, in the proposed imbalan…
Changsha University（长沙学院）；Hunan University of Finance and Economics（湖南财政经济学院）；Jiangxi Vocational Technical College of Industry and Trade（江西工业贸易职业技术学院）；Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学）
Many important real-world applications involve time-series data with skewed distribution. Compared to conventional imbalance learning problems, the classification of imbalanced time-series data is more challenging due to high dimensionality and high inter-variable correlation. This paper proposes a structure preserving Oversampling method to combat the High-dimensional Imbalanced Time-series classification (OHIT). OHIT first leverages a density-ratio based shared nearest neighbor clustering algorithm to capture the modes of minority class in high-dimensional space. It then for each mode applie…
Machine learning classifiers often stumble over imbalanced datasets where classes are not equally represented. This inherent bias towards the majority class may result in low accuracy in labeling minority class. Imbalanced learning is prevalent in many real-world applications, such as medical research, network intrusion detection, and fraud detection in credit card transactions, etc. A good number of research works have been reported to tackle this challenging problem. For example, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling TEchnique (SMOTE) and ADAptive SYNthetic sampling approach (ADASYN) use oversamp…
University of Rostock（罗斯托克大学）；Grenoble Alps University（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；Grenoble Institute of Technology（格勒诺布尔理工学院）；Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS)（斯泰伦博斯高等研究院）；Stellenbosch University（斯泰伦博斯大学）
The Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique (SMOTE) is widely-used for the analysis of imbalanced datasets. It is known that SMOTE frequently over-generalizes the minority class, leading to misclassifications for the majority class, and effecting the overall balance of the model. In this article, we present an approach that overcomes this limitation of SMOTE, employing Localized Random Affine Shadowsampling (LoRAS) to oversample from an approximated data manifold of the minority class. We benchmarked our algorithm with 14 publicly available imbalanced datasets using three different Machine L…
Handling imbalanced datasets is a challenging problem that if not treated correctly results in reduced classification performance. Imbalanced datasets are commonly handled using minority oversampling, whereas the SMOTE algorithm is a successful oversampling algorithm with numerous extensions. SMOTE extensions do not have a theoretical guarantee during training to work better than SMOTE and in many instances their performance is data dependent. In this paper we propose a novel extension to the SMOTE algorithm with a theoretical guarantee for improved classification performance. The proposed app…
Imbalanced datasets are ubiquitous. Classification performance on imbalanced datasets is generally poor for the minority class as the classifier cannot learn decision boundaries well. However, in sensitive applications like fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and spam identification, it is extremely important to classify the minority instances correctly. In this paper, we present a novel technique based on genetic algorithms, GenSample, for oversampling the minority class in imbalanced datasets. GenSample decides the rate of oversampling a minority example by taking into account the difficulty…
Class imbalance is a common problem in supervised learning and impedes the predictive performance of classification models. Popular countermeasures include oversampling the minority class. Standard methods like SMOTE rely on finding nearest neighbours and linear interpolations which are problematic in case of high-dimensional, complex data distributions. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been proposed as an alternative method for generating artificial minority examples as they can model complex distributions. However, prior research on GAN-based oversampling does not incorporate rece…
Score-based generative models (SGMs) are a recent breakthrough in generating fake images. SGMs are known to surpass other generative models, e.g., generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs). Being inspired by their big success, in this work, we fully customize them for generating fake tabular data. In particular, we are interested in oversampling minor classes since imbalanced classes frequently lead to sub-optimal training outcomes. To our knowledge, we are the first presenting a score-based tabular data oversampling method. Firstly, we re-design our own score …
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Duke University（杜克大学）
Class imbalance is a long-standing problem relevant to a number of real-world applications of deep learning. Oversampling techniques, which are effective for handling class imbalance in classical learning systems, can not be directly applied to end-to-end deep learning systems. We propose a three-player adversarial game between a convex generator, a multi-class classifier network, and a real/fake discriminator to perform oversampling in deep learning systems. The convex generator generates new samples from the minority classes as convex combinations of existing instances, aiming to fool both t…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）
The key to overcome class imbalance problems is to capture the distribution of minority class accurately. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown some potentials to tackle class imbalance problems due to their capability of reproducing data distributions given ample training data samples. However, the scarce samples of one or more classes still pose a great challenge for GANs to learn accurate distributions for the minority classes. In this work, we propose an Annealing Genetic GAN (AGGAN) method, which aims to reproduce the distributions closest to the ones of the minority classes u…
Imbalance in the proportion of training samples belonging to different classes often poses performance degradation of conventional classifiers. This is primarily due to the tendency of the classifier to be biased towards the majority classes in the imbalanced dataset. In this paper, we propose a novel three step technique to address imbalanced data. As a first step we significantly oversample the minority class distribution by employing the traditional Synthetic Minority OverSampling Technique (SMOTE) algorithm using the neighborhood of the minority class samples and in the next step we partit…
Imbalanced data classification problem has always been a popular topic in the field of machine learning research. In order to balance the samples between majority and minority class. Oversampling algorithm is used to synthesize new minority class samples, but it could bring in noise. Pointing to the noise problems, this paper proposed a denoising autoencoder neural network (DAE) algorithm which can not only oversample minority class sample through misclassification cost, but it can denoise and classify the sampled dataset. Through experiments, compared with the denoising autoencoder neural net…
TCG Crest Kolkata, India（印度加尔各答TCG Crest）；School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland（爱尔兰都柏林大学学院计算机科学学院）；Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, India（印度统计研究所加尔各答分所）
There is often a mixture of very frequent labels and very infrequent labels in multi-label datatsets. This variation in label frequency, a type class imbalance, creates a significant challenge for building efficient multi-label classification algorithms. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a minority class oversampling scheme, UCLSO, which integrates Unsupervised Clustering and Label-Specific data Oversampling. Clustering is performed to find out the key distinct and locally connected regions of a multi-label dataset (irrespective of the label information). Next, for each label,…
NOVA Information Management School, Universidade Nova de Lisboa（里斯本新大学信息管理学院）
Classification of imbalanced datasets is a challenging task for standard algorithms. Although many methods exist to address this problem in different ways, generating artificial data for the minority class is a more general approach compared to algorithmic modifications. SMOTE algorithm and its variations generate synthetic samples along a line segment that joins minority class instances. In this paper we propose Geometric SMOTE (G-SMOTE) as a generalization of the SMOTE data generation mechanism. G-SMOTE generates synthetic samples in a geometric region of the input space, around each selecte…
University of Rostock（罗斯托克大学）；Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology（莱布尼茨食品系统生物学研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Technische Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）
Data is commonly stored in tabular format. Several fields of research are prone to small imbalanced tabular data. Supervised Machine Learning on such data is often difficult due to class imbalance. Synthetic data generation, i.e., oversampling, is a common remedy used to improve classifier performance. State-of-the-art linear interpolation approaches, such as LoRAS and ProWRAS can be used to generate synthetic samples from the convex space of the minority class to improve classifier performance in such cases. Deep generative networks are common deep learning approaches for synthetic sample gen…
Mutah University（穆塔大学）；Eötvös Loránd University（厄特沃什·罗兰大学）；King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王科技城）
For the last two decades, oversampling has been employed to overcome the challenge of learning from imbalanced datasets. Many approaches to solving this challenge have been offered in the literature. Oversampling, on the other hand, is a concern. That is, models trained on fictitious data may fail spectacularly when put to real-world problems. The fundamental difficulty with oversampling approaches is that, given a real-life population, the synthesized samples may not truly belong to the minority class. As a result, training a classifier on these samples while pretending they represent minorit…
K-IPO: Kendall-constrained Importance Preserving Oversampling for Imbalanced Tabular Data
Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Ioannina（约阿尼纳大学信息与电信系）；Industrial Systems Institute, Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心工业系统研究所）；Archimedes Unit, Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心阿基米德单位）；Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras（帕特雷大学计算机工程与信息学系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras（帕特雷大学机械工程与航空系）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
Learning with imbalanced data is a challenging problem in deep learning. Over-sampling is a widely used technique to re-balance the sampling distribution of training data. However, most existing over-sampling methods only use intra-class information of minority classes to augment the data but ignore the inter-class relationships with the majority ones, which is prone to overfitting, especially when the imbalance ratio is large. To address this issue, we propose a novel over-sampling model, called Majority-Guided VAE~(MGVAE), which generates new minority samples under the guidance of a majority…
Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Playtika Ltd.（Playtika公司）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
When presented with a binary classification problem where the data exhibits severe class imbalance, most standard predictive methods may fail to accurately model the minority class. We present a model based on Generative Adversarial Networks which uses additional regularization losses to map majority samples to corresponding synthetic minority samples. This translation mechanism encourages the synthesized samples to be close to the class boundary. Furthermore, we explore a selection criterion to retain the most useful of the synthesized samples. Experimental results using several downstream cl…
Real-world binary classification tasks are in many cases imbalanced, where the minority class is much smaller than the majority class. This skewness is challenging for machine learning algorithms as they tend to focus on the majority and greatly misclassify the minority. Adding synthetic minority samples to the dataset before training the model is a popular technique to address this difficulty and is commonly achieved by interpolating minority samples. Tabular datasets are often multi-modal and contain discrete (categorical) features in addition to continuous ones which makes interpolation of …
We present a simple yet novel time series imputation technique with the goal of constructing an irregular time series that is uniform across every sample in a data set. Specifically, we fix a grid defined by the midpoints of non-overlapping bins (dubbed "slices") of observation times and ensure that each sample has values for all of the features at that given time. This allows one to both impute fully missing observations to allow uniform time series classification across the entire data and, in special cases, to impute individually missing features. To do so, we slightly generalize the well-k…
Forums play an important role in providing a platform for community interaction. The introduction of irrelevant content or spam by individuals for commercial and social gains tends to degrade the professional experience presented to the forum users. Automated moderation of the relevancy of posted content is desired. Machine learning is used for text classification and finds applications in spam email detection, fraudulent transaction detection etc. The balance of classes in training data is essential in the case of classification algorithms to make the learning efficient and accurate. However,…
CopulaSMOTE: A Copula-Based Oversampling Approach for Imbalanced Classification in Diabetes Prediction
Stanford University School of Medicine（斯坦福大学医学院）；Minnesota State University（明尼苏达州立大学）；University of Louisiana at Lafayette（路易斯安那大学拉斐特分校）；Southern Utah University（犹他州南方大学）
School of Informatics Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学信息学院）
Class-imbalance is an inherent characteristic of multi-label data which affects the prediction accuracy of most multi-label learning methods. One efficient strategy to deal with this problem is to employ resampling techniques before training the classifier. Existing multilabel sampling methods alleviate the (global) imbalance of multi-label datasets. However, performance degradation is mainly due to rare subconcepts and overlapping of classes that could be analysed by looking at the local characteristics of the minority examples, rather than the imbalance of the whole dataset. We propose a new…
Class imbalanced datasets are common in real-world applications that range from credit card fraud detection to rare disease diagnostics. Several popular classification algorithms assume that classes are approximately balanced, and hence build the accompanying objective function to maximize an overall accuracy rate. In these situations, optimizing the overall accuracy will lead to highly skewed predictions towards the majority class. Moreover, the negative business impact resulting from false positives (positive samples incorrectly classified as negative) can be detrimental. Many methods have b…
Media and Data Science Research Lab, Adobe（Adobe 媒体与数据科学研究实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Delhi Technological University（德里理工大学）
Training a classification model on a dataset where the instances of one class outnumber those of the other class is a challenging problem. Such imbalanced datasets are standard in real-world situations such as fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and computational advertising. We propose an iterative data augmentation method, MixBoost, which intelligently selects (Boost) and then combines (Mix) instances from the majority and minority classes to generate synthetic hybrid instances that have characteristics of both classes. We evaluate MixBoost on 20 benchmark datasets, show that it outperforms …
University of Rostock（罗斯托克大学）；Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology（莱布尼茨食品系统生物学研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Royal Holloway, University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）
Over 85 oversampling algorithms, mostly extensions of the SMOTE algorithm, have been built over the past two decades, to solve the problem of imbalanced datasets. However, it has been evident from previous studies that different oversampling algorithms have different degrees of efficiency with different classifiers. With numerous algorithms available, it is difficult to decide on an oversampling algorithm for a chosen classifier. Here, we overcome this problem with a multi-schematic and classifier-independent oversampling approach: ProWRAS(Proximity Weighted Random Affine Shadowsampling). ProW…
University of New South Wales Canberra（新南威尔士大学堪培拉分校）；Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（资讯通信研究院，新加坡科技研究局（A*STAR））
Traditional oversampling methods are generally employed to handle class imbalance in datasets. This oversampling approach is independent of the classifier; thus, it does not offer an end-to-end solution. To overcome this, we propose a three-player adversarial game-based end-to-end method, where a domain-constraints mixture of generators, a discriminator, and a multi-class classifier are used. Rather than adversarial minority oversampling, we propose an adversarial oversampling (AO) and a data-space oversampling (DO) approach. In AO, the generator updates by fooling both the classifier and disc…
Insider threat detection is getting an increased concern from academia, industry, and governments due to the growing number of malicious insider incidents. The existing approaches proposed for detecting insider threats still have a common shortcoming, which is the high number of false alarms (false positives). The challenge in these approaches is that it is essential to detect all anomalous behaviours which belong to a particular threat. To address this shortcoming, we propose an opportunistic knowledge discovery system, namely AnyThreat, with the aim to detect any anomalous behaviour in all m…
Kernel-Based Enhanced Oversampling Method for Imbalanced Classification
Faculty of Science and Technology, BNU-HKBU United International College（北师港浸会大学科技与文学院）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Research and Application for Data Science, BNU-HKBU United International College（广东省数据科学跨学科研究与应用重点实验室（北师港浸会大学））
The authors compared oversampling methods for the problem of multi-class topic classification. The SMOTE algorithm underlies one of the most popular oversampling methods. It consists in choosing two examples of a minority class and generating a new example based on them. In the paper, the authors compared the basic SMOTE method with its two modifications (Borderline SMOTE and ADASYN) and random oversampling technique on the example of one of text classification tasks. The paper discusses the k-nearest neighbor algorithm, the support vector machine algorithm and three types of neural networks (…
School of Computer Science, University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院计算机科学学院）；Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院洞察数据分析中心）；VistaMilk SFI Research Centre, University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院VistaMilk SFI研究中心）
Learning from class imbalanced datasets poses challenges for many machine learning algorithms. Many real-world domains are, by definition, class imbalanced by virtue of having a majority class that naturally has many more instances than its minority class (e.g. genuine bank transactions occur much more often than fraudulent ones). Many methods have been proposed to solve the class imbalance problem, among the most popular being oversampling techniques (such as SMOTE). These methods generate synthetic instances in the minority class, to balance the dataset, performing data augmentations that im…
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…
We explore several oversampling techniques for an imbalanced multi-label classification problem, a setting often encountered when developing models for Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CADx) systems. While most CADx systems aim to optimize classifiers for overall accuracy without considering the relative distribution of each class, we look into using synthetic sampling to increase per-class performance when predicting the degree of malignancy. Using low-level image features and a random forest classifier, we show that using synthetic oversampling techniques increases the sensitivity of the minority c…
Large Language Models for Imbalanced Classification: Diversity makes the difference
Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative (A 2 I 2 )（应用人工智能倡议（A2I2））；Deakin University（德肯大学）；Black Dog Institute（黑狗研究所）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
A learning classifier must outperform a trivial solution, in case of imbalanced data, this condition usually does not hold true. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel data level resampling method - Clustering Based Oversampling for improved learning from class imbalanced datasets. The essential idea behind the proposed method is to use the distance between a minority class sample and its respective cluster centroid to infer the number of new sample points to be generated for that minority class sample. The proposed algorithm has very less dependence on the technique used for finding clu…
