Class Weights Random Forest Algorithm for Processing Class Imbalanced Medical Data

Abstract

The classification in class imbalanced data has drawn significant interest in medical application. Most existing methods are prone to categorize the samples into the majority class, resulting in bias, in particular the insufficient identification of minority class. A kind of novel approach, class weights random forest is introduced to address the problem, by assigning individual weights for each class instead of a single weight. The validation test on UCI data sets demonstrates that for imbalanced medical data, the proposed method enhanced the overall performance of the classifier while producing high accuracy in identifying both majority and minority class.