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 recent advancements from the literature on generating realistic tabular data with GANs. Previous studies also focus on numerical variables whereas categorical features are common in many business applications of classification methods such as credit scoring. The paper propoes an oversampling method based on a conditional Wasserstein GAN that can effectively model tabular datasets with numerical and categorical variables and pays special attention to the down-stream classification task through an auxiliary classifier loss. We benchmark our method against standard oversampling methods and the imbalanced baseline on seven real-world datasets. Empirical results evidence the competitiveness of GAN-based oversampling.
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 …
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…
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…
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…
Dealing with imbalanced data is one of the main challenges in machine/deep learning algorithms for classification. This issue is more important with log message data as it is typically very imbalanced and negative logs are rare. In this paper, a model is proposed to generate text log messages using a SeqGAN network. Then features are extracted using an Autoencoder and anomaly detection is done using a GRU network. The proposed model is evaluated with two imbalanced log data sets, namely BGL and Openstack. Results are presented which show that oversampling and balancing data increases the accur…
The collected data from industrial machines are often imbalanced, which poses a negative effect on learning algorithms. However, this problem becomes more challenging for a mixed type of data or while there is overlapping between classes. Class-imbalance problem requires a robust learning system which can timely predict and classify the data. We propose a new adversarial network for simultaneous classification and fault detection. In particular, we restore the balance in the imbalanced dataset by generating faulty samples from the proposed mixture of data distribution. We designed the discrimi…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Virginia Commonwealth University（弗吉尼亚联邦大学）
Despite over two decades of progress, imbalanced data is still considered a significant challenge for contemporary machine learning models. Modern advances in deep learning have magnified the importance of the imbalanced data problem. The two main approaches to address this issue are based on loss function modifications and instance resampling. Instance sampling is typically based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which may suffer from mode collapse. Therefore, there is a need for an oversampling method that is specifically tailored to deep learning models, can work on raw images whil…
Although deep learning has achieved impressive advances in transient stability assessment of power systems, the insufficient and imbalanced samples still trap the training effect of the data-driven methods. This paper proposes a controllable sample generation framework based on Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Network (CTGAN) to generate specified transient stability samples. To fit the complex feature distribution of the transient stability samples, the proposed framework firstly models the samples as tabular data and uses Gaussian mixture models to normalize the tabular data. Then …
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…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；National Research Council of Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）；Virginia Commonwealth University（弗吉尼亚联邦大学）
Deep learning models tend to memorize training data, which hurts their ability to generalize to under-represented classes. We empirically study a convolutional neural network's internal representation of imbalanced image data and measure the generalization gap between a model's feature embeddings in the training and test sets, showing that the gap is wider for minority classes. This insight enables us to design an efficient three-phase CNN training framework for imbalanced data. The framework involves training the network end-to-end on imbalanced data to learn accurate feature embeddings, perf…
The University of the South Pacific（南太平洋大学）；IIT (BHU) Varanasi（印度理工学院（瓦拉纳西分校））；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
Class imbalance in a dataset is a major problem for classifiers that results in poor prediction with a high true positive rate (TPR) but a low true negative rate (TNR) for a majority positive training dataset. Generally, the pre-processing technique of oversampling of minority class(es) are used to overcome this deficiency. Our focus is on using the hybridization of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE) to address class imbalanced problems. We propose a novel two-phase oversampling approach involving knowledge transfer that has the synergy …
Learning from imbalanced data is among the most challenging areas in contemporary machine learning. This becomes even more difficult when considered the context of big data that calls for dedicated architectures capable of high-performance processing. Apache Spark is a highly efficient and popular architecture, but it poses specific challenges for algorithms to be implemented for it. While oversampling algorithms are an effective way for handling class imbalance, they have not been designed for distributed environments. In this paper, we propose a holistic look on oversampling algorithms for i…
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））
Deep Learning Meets Oversampling: A Learning Framework to Handle Imbalanced Classification
Faculty of Engineering, University of Ruhuna（鲁胡纳大学工程学院）；College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics, The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学工程、计算与控制学院）
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…
Cyberspace occupies a large portion of people's life in the age of modern technology, and while there are those who utilize it for good, there are also those who do not. Malware is an application whose construction was not motivated by a benign goal and it can harm, steal, or even alter personal information and secure applications and software. Thus, there are numerous techniques to avoid malware, one of which is to develop samples of malware so that the system can be updated with the growing number of malwares, allowing it to recognize when malwares attempt to enter. The Generative Adversaria…
Synthesizing tabular data is attracting much attention these days for various purposes. With sophisticate synthetic data, for instance, one can augment its training data. For the past couple of years, tabular data synthesis techniques have been greatly improved. Recent work made progress to address many problems in synthesizing tabular data, such as the imbalanced distribution and multimodality problems. However, the data utility of state-of-the-art methods is not satisfactory yet. In this work, we significantly improve the utility by designing our generator and discriminator based on neural o…
Transductive graph-based semi-supervised learning methods usually build an undirected graph utilizing both labeled and unlabeled samples as vertices. Those methods propagate label information of labeled samples to neighbors through their edges in order to get the predicted labels of unlabeled samples. Most popular semi-supervised learning approaches are sensitive to initial label distribution happened in imbalanced labeled datasets. The class boundary will be severely skewed by the majority classes in an imbalanced classification. In this paper, we proposed a simple and effective approach to a…
MIT LIDS（麻省理工学院信息与决策系统实验室）；MRC-BSU, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学MRC生物统计组）；Universidad Rey Juan Carlos（胡安·卡洛斯国王大学）
Modeling the probability distribution of rows in tabular data and generating realistic synthetic data is a non-trivial task. Tabular data usually contains a mix of discrete and continuous columns. Continuous columns may have multiple modes whereas discrete columns are sometimes imbalanced making the modeling difficult. Existing statistical and deep neural network models fail to properly model this type of data. We design TGAN, which uses a conditional generative adversarial network to address these challenges. To aid in a fair and thorough comparison, we design a benchmark with 7 simulated and…
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…
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…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been used in many different applications to generate realistic synthetic data. We introduce a novel GAN with Autoencoder (GAN-AE) architecture to generate synthetic samples for variable length, multi-feature sequence datasets. In this model, we develop a GAN architecture with an additional autoencoder component, where recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are used for each component of the model in order to generate synthetic data to improve classification accuracy for a highly imbalanced medical device dataset. In addition to the medical device dataset, …
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）
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…
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…
NOVA Information Management School, Universidade Nova de Lisboa（新里斯本大学新里斯本信息管理学院）
Learning from class-imbalanced data continues to be a common and challenging problem in supervised learning as standard classification algorithms are designed to handle balanced class distributions. While different strategies exist to tackle this problem, methods which generate artificial data to achieve a balanced class distribution are more versatile than modifications to the classification algorithm. Such techniques, called oversamplers, modify the training data, allowing any classifier to be used with class-imbalanced datasets. Many algorithms have been proposed for this task, but most are…
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 combin…
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…
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…
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…
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, …
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…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang University - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute（浙江大学伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳香槟校区联合学院）
Class imbalance has a detrimental effect on the predictive performance of most supervised learning algorithms as the imbalanced distribution can lead to a bias preferring the majority class. To solve this problem, we propose a Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) method with Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) technique for imbalanced tabular datasets. Contrastive learning (CL) can extract the information hidden in data even without labels and has shown some potential for imbalanced learning tasks. SCL further considers the label information based on CL, which also addresses the insufficie…
