Oversampling for Imbalanced Learning Based on K-Means and SMOTE

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 complex and tend to generate unnecessary noise. This work presents a simple and effective oversampling method based on k-means clustering and SMOTE oversampling, which avoids the generation of noise and effectively overcomes imbalances between and within classes. Empirical results of extensive experiments with 71 datasets show that training data oversampled with the proposed method improves classification results. Moreover, k-means SMOTE consistently outperforms other popular oversampling methods. An implementation is made available in the python programming language.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Efficient multi-label classification for evolving data streams

Many real world problems involve data which can be considered as multi-label data streams. Efficient methods exist for multi-label classification in non streaming scenarios. However, learning in evolving streaming scenarios is more challenging, as the learners must be able to adapt to change using limited time and memory. This paper proposes a new experimental framework for studying multi-label evolving stream classification, and new efficient methods that combine the best practices in streaming scenarios with the best practices in multi-label classification. We present a Multi-label Hoeffding Tree with multilabel classifiers at the leaves as a base classifier. We obtain fast and accurate methods, that are well suited for this challenging multi-label classification streaming task. Using the new experimental framework, we test our methodology by performing an evaluation study on synthetic and real-world datasets. In comparison to well-known batch multi-label methods, we obtain encouraging results