A Selective Sampling Method for Imbalanced Data Learning on Support Vector Machines

The class imbalance problem in classification has been recognized as a significant research problem in recent years and a number of methods have been introduced to improve classification results. Rebalancing class distributions (such as over-sampling or under-sampling of learning datasets) has been popular due to its ease of implementation and relatively good performance. For the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification algorithm, research efforts have focused on reducing the size of learning sets because of the algorithm\u27s sensitivity to the size of the dataset. In this dissertation, we propose a metaheuristic approach (Genetic Algorithm) for under-sampling of an imbalanced dataset in the context of a SVM classifier. The goal of this approach is to find an optimal learning set from imbalanced datasets without empirical studies that are normally required to find an optimal class distribution. Experimental results using real datasets indicate that this metaheuristic under-sampling performed well in rebalancing class distributions. Furthermore, an iterative sampling methodology was used to produce smaller learning sets by removing redundant instances. It incorporates informative and the representative under-sampling mechanisms to speed up the learning procedure for imbalanced data learning with a SVM. When compared with existing rebalancing methods and the metaheuristic approach to under-sampling, this iterative methodology not only provides good performance but also enables a SVM classifier to learn using very small learning sets for imbalanced data learning. For large-scale imbalanced datasets, this methodology provides an efficient and effective solution for imbalanced data learning with an SVM

A Classification Framework for Imbalanced Data

As information technology advances, the demands for developing a reliable and highly accurate predictive model from many domains are increasing. Traditional classification algorithms can be limited in their performance on highly imbalanced data sets. In this dissertation, we study two common problems when training data is imbalanced, and propose effective algorithms to solve them. Firstly, we investigate the problem in building a multi-class classification model from imbalanced class distribution. We develop an effective technique to improve the performance of the model by formulating the problem as a multi-class SVM with an objective to maximize G-mean value. A ramp loss function is used to simplify and solve the problem. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets confirm that our new method can effectively solve the multi-class classification problem when the datasets are highly imbalanced. Secondly, we explore the problem in learning a global classification model from distributed data sources with privacy constraints. In this problem, not only data sources have different class distributions but combining data into one central data is also prohibited. We propose a privacy-preserving framework for building a global SVM from distributed data sources. Our new framework avoid constructing a global kernel matrix by mapping non-linear inputs to a linear feature space and then solve a distributed linear SVM from these virtual points. Our method can solve both imbalance and privacy problems while achieving the same level of accuracy as regular SVM. Finally, we extend our framework to handle high-dimensional data by utilizing Generalized Multiple Kernel Learning to select a sparse combination of features and kernels. This new model produces a smaller set of features, but yields much higher accuracy