A Noise-Filtered Under-Sampling Scheme for Imbalanced Classification

Qi Kang, Sisi Li, MengChu Zhou

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics · 2016 · 240 citations · 66 references

Concepts

TL;DR

Under‑sampling is a common preprocessing technique for class imbalance that balances datasets and mitigates majority bias, but it uses all minority instances, which can degrade performance when noisy minority examples are present. This study proposes a noise‑filtered under‑sampling scheme and examines how algorithm performance varies with the imbalance ratio. The scheme is applied to four popular under‑sampling methods—Undersampling + AdaBoost, RUSBoost, UnderBagging, and EasyEnsemble—and evaluated through benchmark experiments and significance analysis. Results show that the noise‑filtered scheme significantly improves AUC, F‑measure, and G‑mean compared to the original under‑sampling methods.

Abstract

Under-sampling is a popular data preprocessing method in dealing with class imbalance problems, with the purposes of balancing datasets to achieve a high classification rate and avoiding the bias toward majority class examples. It always uses full minority data in a training dataset. However, some noisy minority examples may reduce the performance of classifiers. In this paper, a new under-sampling scheme is proposed by incorporating a noise filter before executing resampling. In order to verify the efficiency, this scheme is implemented based on four popular under-sampling methods, i.e., Undersampling + Adaboost, RUSBoost, UnderBagging, and EasyEnsemble through benchmarks and significance analysis. Furthermore, this paper also summarizes the relationship between algorithm performance and imbalanced ratio. Experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme can improve the original undersampling-based methods with significance in terms of three popular metrics for imbalanced classification, i.e., the area under the curve, -measure, and -mean.

References

66