Class imbalance classification is a challenging research problem in data mining and machine learning, as most of the real-life datasets are often imbalanced in nature. Existing learning algorithms maximise the classification accuracy by correctly classifying the majority class, but misclassify the minority class. However, the minority class instances are representing the concept with greater interest than the majority class instances in real-life applications. Recently, several techniques based on sampling methods (under-sampling of the majority class and over-sampling the minority class), cost-sensitive learning methods, and ensemble learning have been used in the literature for classifying imbalanced datasets. In this paper, we introduce a new clustering-based under-sampling approach with boosting (AdaBoost) algorithm, called CUSBoost, for effective imbalanced classification. The proposed algorithm provides an alternative to RUSBoost (random under-sampling with AdaBoost) and SMOTEBoost (synthetic minority over-sampling with AdaBoost) algorithms. We evaluated the performance of CUSBoost algorithm with the state-of-the-art methods based on ensemble learning like AdaBoost, RUSBoost, SMOTEBoost on 13 imbalance binary and multi-class datasets with various imbalance ratios. The experimental results show that the CUSBoost is a promising and effective approach for dealing with highly imbalanced datasets.
@cite_9: The class imbalance problems have been reported to severely hinder classification performance of many standard learning algorithms, and have attracted a great deal of attention from researchers of different fields. Therefore, a number of methods, such as sampling methods, cost-sensitive learning methods, and bagging and boosting based ensemble methods, have been proposed to solve these problems. However, these conventional class imbalance handling methods might suffer from the loss of potentially useful information, unexpected mistakes or increasing the likelihood of overfitting because they may alter the original data distribution. Thus we propose a novel ensemble method, which firstly converts an imbalanced data set into multiple balanced ones and then builds a number of classifiers on these multiple data with a specific classification algorithm. Finally, the classification results of these classifiers for new data are combined by a specific ensemble rule. In the empirical study, different class imbalance data handling methods including three conventional sampling methods, one cost-sensitive learning method, six Bagging and Boosting based ensemble methods, our previous method EM1vs1 and two fuzzy-rule based classification methods were compared with our method. The experimental results on 46 imbalanced data sets show that our proposed method is usually superior to the conventional imbalance data handling methods when solving the highly imbalanced problems. HighlightsWe propose a novel ensemble method to handle imbalanced binary data.The method turns imbalanced data learning into multiple balanced data learning.Our method usually performs better than the conventional methods on imbalanced data.
@cite_9 proposed an ensemble method for addressing binary-class imbalance problems by converting an imbalanced binary learning process into multiple balanced learning processes. In this method, the majority class instances were divided into several groups sub-data sets, where each sub-set has the similar number of minority class instances. So, several balanced data sets were generated. Then, each balanced data set was employed to build a binary classifier. Finally, these binary classifiers were combined into an ensemble classifier to classify new data.