5,428 research outputs found
SMOTE for regression
Several real world prediction problems involve forecasting rare values of a target variable. When this variable is nominal we have a problem of class imbalance that was already studied thoroughly within machine learning. For regression tasks, where the target variable is continuous, few works exist addressing this type of problem. Still, important application areas involve forecasting rare extreme values of a continuous target variable. This paper describes a contribution to this type of tasks. Namely, we propose to address such tasks by sampling approaches. These approaches change the distribution of the given training data set to decrease the problem of imbalance between the rare target cases and the most frequent ones. We present a modification of the well-known Smote algorithm that allows its use on these regression tasks. In an extensive set of experiments we provide empirical evidence for the superiority of our proposals for these particular regression tasks. The proposed SmoteR method can be used with any existing regression algorithm turning it into a general tool for addressing problems of forecasting rare extreme values of a continuous target variable
Machine Learning Techniques for Stellar Light Curve Classification
We apply machine learning techniques in an attempt to predict and classify
stellar properties from noisy and sparse time series data. We preprocessed over
94 GB of Kepler light curves from MAST to classify according to ten distinct
physical properties using both representation learning and feature engineering
approaches. Studies using machine learning in the field have been primarily
done on simulated data, making our study one of the first to use real light
curve data for machine learning approaches. We tuned our data using previous
work with simulated data as a template and achieved mixed results between the
two approaches. Representation learning using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) produced no successful predictions, but our work
with feature engineering was successful for both classification and regression.
In particular, we were able to achieve values for stellar density, stellar
radius, and effective temperature with low error (~ 2 - 4%) and good accuracy
(~ 75%) for classifying the number of transits for a given star. The results
show promise for improvement for both approaches upon using larger datasets
with a larger minority class. This work has the potential to provide a
foundation for future tools and techniques to aid in the analysis of
astrophysical data.Comment: Accepted to The Astronomical Journa
A critical assessment of imbalanced class distribution problem: the case of predicting freshmen student attrition
Predicting student attrition is an intriguing yet challenging problem for any academic institution. Class-imbalanced data is a common in the field of student retention, mainly because a lot of students register but fewer students drop out. Classification techniques for imbalanced dataset can yield deceivingly high
prediction accuracy where the overall predictive accuracy is usually driven by the majority class at the expense of having very poor performance on the crucial minority class. In this study, we compared different data balancing techniques to improve the predictive accuracy in minority class while maintaining satisfactory overall classification performance. Specifically, we tested three balancing techniques—oversampling, under-sampling and synthetic minority over-sampling (SMOTE)—along with four popular classification methods—logistic regression, decision trees, neuron networks and support vector machines. We used a large and feature rich institutional student data (between the years 2005 and 2011) to assess the efficacy of both balancing techniques as well as prediction methods. The results indicated that the support vector machine combined with SMOTE data-balancing technique achieved the best classification performance with a 90.24% overall accuracy on the 10-fold holdout sample. All three data-balancing techniques improved the prediction accuracy for the minority class. Applying sensitivity analyses on developed models, we also identified the most important variables for accurate prediction of student attrition. Application of these models has the potential to accurately predict at-risk students and help reduce student dropout rates
Is "Better Data" Better than "Better Data Miners"? (On the Benefits of Tuning SMOTE for Defect Prediction)
We report and fix an important systematic error in prior studies that ranked
classifiers for software analytics. Those studies did not (a) assess
classifiers on multiple criteria and they did not (b) study how variations in
the data affect the results. Hence, this paper applies (a) multi-criteria tests
while (b) fixing the weaker regions of the training data (using SMOTUNED, which
is a self-tuning version of SMOTE). This approach leads to dramatically large
increases in software defect predictions. When applied in a 5*5
cross-validation study for 3,681 JAVA classes (containing over a million lines
of code) from open source systems, SMOTUNED increased AUC and recall by 60% and
20% respectively. These improvements are independent of the classifier used to
predict for quality. Same kind of pattern (improvement) was observed when a
comparative analysis of SMOTE and SMOTUNED was done against the most recent
class imbalance technique. In conclusion, for software analytic tasks like
defect prediction, (1) data pre-processing can be more important than
classifier choice, (2) ranking studies are incomplete without such
pre-processing, and (3) SMOTUNED is a promising candidate for pre-processing.Comment: 10 pages + 2 references. Accepted to International Conference of
Software Engineering (ICSE), 201
Is "Better Data" Better than "Better Data Miners"? (On the Benefits of Tuning SMOTE for Defect Prediction)
We report and fix an important systematic error in prior studies that ranked
classifiers for software analytics. Those studies did not (a) assess
classifiers on multiple criteria and they did not (b) study how variations in
the data affect the results. Hence, this paper applies (a) multi-criteria tests
while (b) fixing the weaker regions of the training data (using SMOTUNED, which
is a self-tuning version of SMOTE). This approach leads to dramatically large
increases in software defect predictions. When applied in a 5*5
cross-validation study for 3,681 JAVA classes (containing over a million lines
of code) from open source systems, SMOTUNED increased AUC and recall by 60% and
20% respectively. These improvements are independent of the classifier used to
predict for quality. Same kind of pattern (improvement) was observed when a
comparative analysis of SMOTE and SMOTUNED was done against the most recent
class imbalance technique. In conclusion, for software analytic tasks like
defect prediction, (1) data pre-processing can be more important than
classifier choice, (2) ranking studies are incomplete without such
pre-processing, and (3) SMOTUNED is a promising candidate for pre-processing.Comment: 10 pages + 2 references. Accepted to International Conference of
Software Engineering (ICSE), 201
Separation of pulsar signals from noise with supervised machine learning algorithms
We evaluate the performance of four different machine learning (ML)
algorithms: an Artificial Neural Network Multi-Layer Perceptron (ANN MLP ),
Adaboost, Gradient Boosting Classifier (GBC), XGBoost, for the separation of
pulsars from radio frequency interference (RFI) and other sources of noise,
using a dataset obtained from the post-processing of a pulsar search pi peline.
This dataset was previously used for cross-validation of the SPINN-based
machine learning engine, used for the reprocessing of HTRU-S survey data
arXiv:1406.3627. We have used Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique
(SMOTE) to deal with high class imbalance in the dataset. We report a variety
of quality scores from all four of these algorithms on both the non-SMOTE and
SMOTE datasets. For all the above ML methods, we report high accuracy and
G-mean in both the non-SMOTE and SMOTE cases. We study the feature importances
using Adaboost, GBC, and XGBoost and also from the minimum Redundancy Maximum
Relevance approach to report algorithm-agnostic feature ranking. From these
methods, we find that the signal to noise of the folded profile to be the best
feature. We find that all the ML algorithms report FPRs about an order of
magnitude lower than the corresponding FPRs obtained in arXiv:1406.3627, for
the same recall value.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Computin
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