In this work, we consider the problem of imbalanced data in a regression framework when the imbalanced phenomenon concerns continuous or discrete covariates. Such a situation can lead to biases in the estimates. In this case, we propose a data augmentation algorithm that combines a weighted resampling (WR) and a data augmentation (DA) procedure. In a first step, the DA procedure permits exploring a wider support than the initial one. In a second step, the WR method drives the exogenous distribution to a target one. We discuss the choice of the DA procedure through a numerical study that illustrates the advantages of this approach. Finally, an actuarial application is studied.
Synthetic Augmentation in Imbalanced Learning: When It Helps, When It Hurts, and How Much to Add
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Duke University（电气与计算机工程系，杜克大学）；Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics and Department of Computer Science, Duke University（生物统计学与生物信息学系和计算机科学系，杜克大学）
We consider the problem of mixed linear regression (MLR), where each observed sample belongs to one of $K$ unknown linear models. In practical applications, the proportions of the $K$ components are often imbalanced. Unfortunately, most MLR methods do not perform well in such settings. Motivated by this practical challenge, in this work we propose Mix-IRLS, a novel, simple and fast algorithm for MLR with excellent performance on both balanced and imbalanced mixtures. In contrast to popular approaches that recover the $K$ models simultaneously, Mix-IRLS does it sequentially using tools from rob…
The fact that image datasets are often imbalanced poses an intense challenge for deep learning techniques. In this paper, we propose a method to restore the balance in imbalanced images, by coalescing two concurrent methods, generative adversarial networks (GANs) and capsule network. In our model, generative and discriminative networks play a novel competitive game, in which the generator generates samples towards specific classes from multivariate probabilities distribution. The discriminator of our model is designed in a way that while recognizing the real and fake samples, it is also requir…
When Does Synthetic Data Augmentation Improve Score-Based Imbalanced Classification?
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Duke University（电气与计算机工程系，杜克大学）；Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Duke University（生物统计学与生物信息学系，杜克大学）；Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics and Department of Computer Science, Duke University（生物统计学与生物信息学系和计算机科学系，杜克大学）
Time Series Data Augmentation as an Imbalanced Learning Problem
Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto（波尔图大学工程学院）；Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (LIACC)（人工智能与计算机科学实验室（LIACC））；Notre Dame University（圣母大学）；Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS（弗劳恩霍夫葡萄牙AICOS机构）
Comparative Analysis of Data Preprocessing Methods, Feature Selection Techniques and Machine Learning Models for Improved Classification and Regression Performance on Imbalanced Genetic Data
Evergreen Valley College（埃弗格林谷学院）；Gilead Sciences（吉利德科学公司）
Faculty of Sciences - University of Porto（波尔图大学理学院）；INESC TEC（葡萄牙国家电气与计算机工程系统研究所）
Imbalanced domain learning aims to produce accurate models in predicting instances that, though underrepresented, are of utmost importance for the domain. Research in this field has been mainly focused on classification tasks. Comparatively, the number of studies carried out in the context of regression tasks is negligible. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of loss functions capable of focusing on minimizing the errors of extreme (rare) values. Recently, an evaluation metric was introduced: Squared Error Relevance Area (SERA). This metric posits a bigger emphasis on the errors commi…
Image classification datasets are often imbalanced, characteristic that negatively affects the accuracy of deep-learning classifiers. In this work we propose balancing GAN (BAGAN) as an augmentation tool to restore balance in imbalanced datasets. This is challenging because the few minority-class images may not be enough to train a GAN. We overcome this issue by including during the adversarial training all available images of majority and minority classes. The generative model learns useful features from majority classes and uses these to generate images for minority classes. We apply class c…
The logistic regression model is known to converge to a Poisson point process model if the binary response tends to infinitely imbalanced. In this paper, it is shown that this phenomenon is universal in a wide class of link functions on binomial regression. The proof relies on the extreme value theory. For the logit, probit and complementary log-log link functions, the intensity measure of the point process becomes an exponential family. For some other link functions, deformed exponential families appear. A penalized maximum likelihood estimator for the Poisson point process model is suggested…
Training classification models on imbalanced data tends to result in bias towards the majority class. In this paper, we demonstrate how variable discretization and cost-sensitive logistic regression help mitigate this bias on an imbalanced credit scoring dataset, and further show the application of the variable discretization technique on the data from other domains, demonstrating its potential as a generic technique for classifying imbalanced data beyond credit socring. The performance measurements include ROC curves, Area under ROC Curve (AUC), Type I Error, Type II Error, accuracy, and F1 s…
Qingdao University（青岛大学）；University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）
We introduce a discriminative regression approach to supervised classification in this paper. It estimates a representation model while accounting for discriminativeness between classes, thereby enabling accurate derivation of categorical information. This new type of regression models extends existing models such as ridge, lasso, and group lasso through explicitly incorporating discriminative information. As a special case we focus on a quadratic model that admits a closed-form analytical solution. The corresponding classifier is called discriminative regression machine (DRM). Three iterative…
In this paper we extend the work of Owen (2007) by deriving a second order expansion for the slope parameter in logistic regression, when the size of the majority class is unbounded and the minority class is finite. More precisely, we demonstrate that the second order term converges to a normal distribution and explicitly compute its variance, which surprisingly once again depends only on the mean of the minority class points and not their arrangement under mild regularity assumptions. In the case that the majority class is normally distributed, we illustrate that the variance of the the limit…
Matrix sketching is a recently developed data compression technique. An input matrix A is efficiently approximated with a smaller matrix B, so that B preserves most of the properties of A up to some guaranteed approximation ratio. In so doing numerical operations on big data sets become faster. Sketching algorithms generally use random projections to compress the original dataset and this stochastic generation process makes them amenable to statistical analysis. The statistical properties of sketching algorithms have been widely studied in the context of multiple linear regression. In this pap…
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
Though data augmentation has rapidly emerged as a key tool for optimization in modern machine learning, a clear picture of how augmentation schedules affect optimization and interact with optimization hyperparameters such as learning rate is nascent. In the spirit of classical convex optimization and recent work on implicit bias, the present work analyzes the effect of augmentation on optimization in the simple convex setting of linear regression with MSE loss. We find joint schedules for learning rate and data augmentation scheme under which augmented gradient descent provably converges and c…
In medical domain, data features often contain missing values. This can create serious bias in the predictive modeling. Typical standard data mining methods often produce poor performance measures. In this paper, we propose a new method to simultaneously classify large datasets and reduce the effects of missing values. The proposed method is based on a multilevel framework of the cost-sensitive SVM and the expected maximization imputation method for missing values, which relies on iterated regression analyses. We compare classification results of multilevel SVM-based algorithms on public bench…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Córdoba（科尔多瓦大学）
Data augmentation is rapidly gaining attention in machine learning. Synthetic data can be generated by simple transformations or through the data distribution. In the latter case, the main challenge is to estimate the label associated to new synthetic patterns. This paper studies the effect of generating synthetic data by convex combination of patterns and the use of these as unsupervised information in a semi-supervised learning framework with support vector machines, avoiding thus the need to label synthetic examples. We perform experiments on a total of 53 binary classification datasets. Ou…
University of Sao Paulo（圣保罗大学）；University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）
In this paper we propose the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to generate artificial training data for machine learning tasks. The generation of artificial training data can be extremely useful in situations such as imbalanced data sets, performing a role similar to SMOTE or ADASYN. It is also useful when the data contains sensitive information, and it is desirable to avoid using the original data set as much as possible (example: medical data). We test our proposal on benchmark data sets using different network architectures, and show that a Decision Tree (DT) classifier trained u…
PARIS: Pruning Algorithm via the Representer theorem for Imbalanced Scenarios
Department of Physics and Astronomy（物理与天文学系）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦女王玛丽大学）；University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学）；SWx-TREC (Space Weather Technology Research and Education Center)（空间天气技术研究与教育中心）
University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）
The automatic identification of propaganda has gained significance in recent years due to technological and social changes in the way news is generated and consumed. That this task can be addressed effectively using BERT, a powerful new architecture which can be fine-tuned for text classification tasks, is not surprising. However, propaganda detection, like other tasks that deal with news documents and other forms of decontextualized social communication (e.g. sentiment analysis), inherently deals with data whose categories are simultaneously imbalanced and dissimilar. We show that BERT, while…
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…
Chongqing University（重庆大学）；Beijing Institute of Control Engineering（北京控制工程研究所）
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed deep learning method which enables multiple participants, such as mobile phones and IoT devices, to contribute a neural network model while their private training data remains in local devices. This distributed approach is promising in the edge computing system where have a large corpus of decentralized data and require high privacy. However, unlike the common training dataset, the data distribution of the edge computing system is imbalanced which will introduce biases in the model training and cause a decrease in accuracy of federated learning applicat…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Syracuse University（雪城大学）
In supervised machine learning for author name disambiguation, negative training data are often dominantly larger than positive training data. This paper examines how the ratios of negative to positive training data can affect the performance of machine learning algorithms to disambiguate author names in bibliographic records. On multiple labeled datasets, three classifiers - Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, and Random Forest - are trained through representative features such as coauthor names, and title words extracted from the same training data but with various positive-negative training d…
