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

Tracking the History and Evolution of Entities: Entity-centric Temporal Analysis of Large Social Media Archives

How did the popularity of the Greek Prime Minister evolve in 2015? How did the predominant sentiment about him vary during that period? Were there any controversial sub-periods? What other entities were related to him during these periods? To answer these questions, one needs to analyze archived documents and data about the query entities, such as old news articles or social media archives. In particular, user-generated content posted in social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, can be seen as a comprehensive documentation of our society, and thus meaningful analysis methods over such archived data are of immense value for sociologists, historians and other interested parties who want to study the history and evolution of entities and events. To this end, in this paper we propose an entity-centric approach to analyze social media archives and we define measures that allow studying how entities were reflected in social media in different time periods and under different aspects, like popularity, attitude, controversiality, and connectedness with other entities. A case study using a large Twitter archive of four years illustrates the insights that can be gained by such an entity-centric and multi-aspect analysis.Comment: This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in the International Journal on Digital Libraries (2018

AdaCC: cumulative cost-sensitive boosting for imbalanced classification

Class imbalance poses a major challenge for machine learning as most supervised learning models might exhibit bias towards the majority class and under-perform in the minority class. Cost-sensitive learning tackles this problem by treating the classes differently, formulated typically via a user-defined fixed misclassification cost matrix provided as input to the learner. Such parameter tuning is a challenging task that requires domain knowledge and moreover, wrong adjustments might lead to overall predictive performance deterioration. In this work, we propose a novel cost-sensitive boosting approach for imbalanced data that dynamically adjusts the misclassification costs over the boosting rounds in response to model’s performance instead of using a fixed misclassification cost matrix. Our method, called AdaCC, is parameter-free as it relies on the cumulative behavior of the boosting model in order to adjust the misclassification costs for the next boosting round and comes with theoretical guarantees regarding the training error. Experiments on 27 real-world datasets from different domains with high class imbalance demonstrate the superiority of our method over 12 state-of-the-art cost-sensitive boosting approaches exhibiting consistent improvements in different measures, for instance, in the range of [0.3–28.56%] for AUC, [3.4–21.4%] for balanced accuracy, [4.8–45%] for gmean and [7.4–85.5%] for recall

AdaCC: Cumulative Cost-Sensitive Boosting for Imbalanced Classification

Class imbalance poses a major challenge for machine learning as most supervised learning models might exhibit bias towards the majority class and under-perform in the minority class. Cost-sensitive learning tackles this problem by treating the classes differently, formulated typically via a user-defined fixed misclassification cost matrix provided as input to the learner. Such parameter tuning is a challenging task that requires domain knowledge and moreover, wrong adjustments might lead to overall predictive performance deterioration. In this work, we propose a novel cost-sensitive boosting approach for imbalanced data that dynamically adjusts the misclassification costs over the boosting rounds in response to model's performance instead of using a fixed misclassification cost matrix. Our method, called AdaCC, is parameter-free as it relies on the cumulative behavior of the boosting model in order to adjust the misclassification costs for the next boosting round and comes with theoretical guarantees regarding the training error. Experiments on 27 real-world datasets from different domains with high class imbalance demonstrate the superiority of our method over 12 state-of-the-art cost-sensitive boosting approaches exhibiting consistent improvements in different measures, for instance, in the range of [0.3%-28.56%] for AUC, [3.4%-21.4%] for balanced accuracy, [4.8%-45%] for gmean and [7.4%-85.5%] for recall.Comment: 30 page