Semi-supervised learning and fairness-aware learning under class imbalance

With the advent of Web 2.0 and the rapid technological advances, there is a plethora of data in every field; however, more data does not necessarily imply more information, rather the quality of data (veracity aspect) plays a key role. Data quality is a major issue, since machine learning algorithms are solely based on historical data to derive novel hypotheses. Data may contain noise, outliers, missing values and/or class labels, and skewed data distributions. The latter case, the so-called class-imbalance problem, is quite old and still affects dramatically machine learning algorithms. Class-imbalance causes classification models to learn effectively one particular class (majority) while ignoring other classes (minority). In extend to this issue, machine learning models that are applied in domains of high societal impact have become biased towards groups of people or individuals who are not well represented within the data. Direct and indirect discriminatory behavior is prohibited by international laws; thus, there is an urgency of mitigating discriminatory outcomes from machine learning algorithms. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose methods that tackle class imbalance, and mitigate discriminatory outcomes in machine learning algorithms. As part of this thesis, we make the following contributions: • Tackling class-imbalance in semi-supervised learning – The class-imbalance problem is very often encountered in classification. There is a variety of methods that tackle this problem; however, there is a lack of methods that deal with class-imbalance in the semi-supervised learning. We address this problem by employing data augmentation in semi-supervised learning process in order to equalize class distributions. We show that semi-supervised learning coupled with data augmentation methods can overcome class-imbalance propagation and significantly outperform the standard semi-supervised annotation process. • Mitigating unfairness in supervised models – Fairness in supervised learning has received a lot of attention over the last years. A growing body of pre-, in- and postprocessing approaches has been proposed to mitigate algorithmic bias; however, these methods consider error rate as the performance measure of the machine learning algorithm, which causes high error rates on the under-represented class. To deal with this problem, we propose approaches that operate in pre-, in- and post-processing layers while accounting for all classes. Our proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance while being able to mitigate unfair outcomes

SMOTE for Learning from Imbalanced Data: Progress and Challenges, Marking the 15-year Anniversary

The Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) preprocessing algorithm is considered \de facto" standard in the framework of learning from imbalanced data. This is due to its simplicity in the design of the procedure, as well as its robustness when applied to di erent type of problems. Since its publication in 2002, SMOTE has proven successful in a variety of applications from several di erent domains. SMOTE has also inspired several approaches to counter the issue of class imbalance, and has also signi cantly contributed to new supervised learning paradigms, including multilabel classi cation, incremental learning, semi-supervised learning, multi-instance learning, among others. It is standard benchmark for learning from imbalanced data. It is also featured in a number of di erent software packages | from open source to commercial. In this paper, marking the fteen year anniversary of SMOTE, we re ect on the SMOTE journey, discuss the current state of a airs with SMOTE, its applications, and also identify the next set of challenges to extend SMOTE for Big Data problems.This work have been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under projects TIN2014-57251-P, TIN2015-68454-R and TIN2017-89517-P; the Project 887 BigDaP-TOOLS - Ayudas Fundaci on BBVA a Equipos de Investigaci on Cient ca 2016; and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant IIS-1447795

A Bibliographic View on Constrained Clustering

A keyword search on constrained clustering on Web-of-Science returned just under 3,000 documents. We ran automatic analyses of those, and compiled our own bibliography of 183 papers which we analysed in more detail based on their topic and experimental study, if any. This paper presents general trends of the area and its sub-topics by Pareto analysis, using citation count and year of publication. We list available software and analyse the experimental sections of our reference collection. We found a notable lack of large comparison experiments. Among the topics we reviewed, applications studies were most abundant recently, alongside deep learning, active learning and ensemble learning.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, 177 reference