An approach to the construction of classifiers from imbalanced datasets is described. A dataset is imbalanced if the classification categories are not approximately equally represented. Often real-world data sets are predominately composed of "normal" examples with only a small percentage of "abnormal" or "interesting" examples. It is also the case that the cost of misclassifying an abnormal (interesting) example as a normal example is often much higher than the cost of the reverse error. Under-sampling of the majority (normal) class has been proposed as a good means of increasing the sensitivity of a classifier to the minority class. This paper shows that a combination of our method of oversampling the minority (abnormal)cla ss and under-sampling the majority (normal) class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space)tha n only under-sampling the majority class. This paper also shows that a combination of our method of over-sampling the minority class and under-sampling the majority class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space)t han varying the loss ratios in Ripper or class priors in Naive Bayes. Our method of over-sampling the minority class involves creating synthetic minority class examples. Experiments are performed using C4.5, Ripper and a Naive Bayes classifier. The method is evaluated using the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC)and the ROC convex hull strategy.

/pdf/smote-synthetic-minority-over-sampling-technique-5ap1gi5ups.pdf

SMOTE: synthetic minority over-sampling technique

An approach to the construction of classifiers from imbalanced datasets is described. A dataset is imbalanced if the classification categories are not approximately equally represented. Often real-world data sets are predominately composed of "normal" examples with only a small percentage of "abnormal" or "interesting" examples. It is also the case that the cost of misclassifying an abnormal (interesting) example as a normal example is often much higher than the cost of the reverse error. Under-sampling of the majority (normal) class has been proposed as a good means of increasing the sensitivity of a classifier to the minority class. This paper shows that a combination of our method of over-sampling the minority (abnormal) class and under-sampling the majority (normal) class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space) than only under-sampling the majority class. This paper also shows that a combination of our method of over-sampling the minority class and under-sampling the majority class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space) than varying the loss ratios in Ripper or class priors in Naive Bayes. Our method of over-sampling the minority class involves creating synthetic minority class examples. Experiments are performed using C4.5, Ripper and a Naive Bayes classifier. The method is evaluated using the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC) and the ROC convex hull strategy.

/pdf/smote-synthetic-minority-over-sampling-technique-3s7jks70tk.pdf

SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique

In machine learning problems, differences in prior class probabilities -- or class imbalances -- have been reported to hinder the performance of some standard classifiers, such as decision trees. This paper presents a systematic study aimed at answering three different questions. First, we attempt to understand the nature of the class imbalance problem by establishing a relationship between concept complexity, size of the training set and class imbalance level. Second, we discuss several basic re-sampling or cost-modifying methods previously proposed to deal with the class imbalance problem and compare their effectiveness. The results obtained by such methods on artificial domains are linked to results in real-world domains. Finally, we investigate the assumption that the class imbalance problem does not only affect decision tree systems but also affects other classification systems such as Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines.

The class imbalance problem: A systematic study

In recent years, many accurate decision support systems have been constructed as black boxes, that is as systems that hide their internal logic to the user. This lack of explanation constitutes both a practical and an ethical issue. The literature reports many approaches aimed at overcoming this crucial weakness, sometimes at the cost of sacrificing accuracy for interpretability. The applications in which black box decision systems can be used are various, and each approach is typically developed to provide a solution for a specific problem and, as a consequence, it explicitly or implicitly delineates its own definition of interpretability and explanation. The aim of this article is to provide a classification of the main problems addressed in the literature with respect to the notion of explanation and the type of black box system. Given a problem definition, a black box type, and a desired explanation, this survey should help the researcher to find the proposals more useful for his own work. The proposed classification of approaches to open black box models should also be useful for putting the many research open questions in perspective.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3236009

A Survey of Methods for Explaining Black Box Models

Methods for voting classification algorithms, such as Bagging and AdaBoost, have been shown to be very successful in improving the accuracy of certain classifiers for artificial and real-world datasets. We review these algorithms and describe a large empirical study comparing several variants in conjunction with a decision tree inducer (three variants) and a Naive-Bayes inducer. The purpose of the study is to improve our understanding of why and when these algorithms, which use perturbation, reweighting, and combination techniques, affect classification error. We provide a bias and variance decomposition of the error to show how different methods and variants influence these two terms. This allowed us to determine that Bagging reduced variance of unstable methods, while boosting methods (AdaBoost and Arc-x4) reduced both the bias and variance of unstable methods but increased the variance for Naive-Bayes, which was very stable. We observed that Arc-x4 behaves differently than AdaBoost if reweighting is used instead of resampling, indicating a fundamental difference. Voting variants, some of which are introduced in this paper, include: pruning versus no pruning, use of probabilistic estimates, weight perturbations (Wagging), and backfitting of data. We found that Bagging improves when probabilistic estimates in conjunction with no-pruning are used, as well as when the data was backfit. We measure tree sizes and show an interesting positive correlation between the increase in the average tree size in AdaBoost trials and its success in reducing the error. We compare the mean-squared error of voting methods to non-voting methods and show that the voting methods lead to large and significant reductions in the mean-squared errors. Practical problems that arise in implementing boosting algorithms are explored, including numerical instabilities and underflows. We use scatterplots that graphically show how AdaBoost reweights instances, emphasizing not only “hard” areas but also outliers and noise.

/pdf/an-empirical-comparison-of-voting-classification-algorithms-10wg9wglay.pdf

An Empirical Comparison of Voting Classification Algorithms: Bagging, Boosting, and Variants

We explore algorithms for learning classification procedures that attempt to minimize the cost of misclassifying examples. First, we consider inductive learning of classification rules. The Reduced Cost Ordering algorithm, a new method for creating a decision list (i.e., an ordered set of rules) is described and compared to a variety of inductive learning approaches. Next, we describe approaches that attempt to minimize costs while avoiding overfitting, and introduce the Clause Prefix method for pruning decision lists. Finally, we consider reducing misclassification costs when a prior domain theory is available.

Reducing misclassification costs

We discuss an approach to constructing composite features during the induction of decision trees. The composite features correspond to m-of-n concepts. There are three goals of this research. First, we explore a family of greedy methods for building m-of-n concepts (one of which, GS, is described in this paper). Second, we show how these concepts can be formed as internal nodes of decision trees, serving as a bias to the learner. Finally, we evaluate the method on several artificially generated and naturally occurring data sets to determine the effects of this bias.

/pdf/id2-of-3-constructive-induction-of-m-of-n-concepts-for-2wy9lvcj2y.pdf

ID2-of-3: Constructive Induction of M-of-N Concepts for Discriminators in Decision Trees

We report on a series of experiments in which all decision trees consistent with the training data are constructed. These experiments were run to gain an understanding of the properties of the set of consistent decision trees and the factors that affect the accuracy of individual trees. In particular, we investigated the relationship between the size of a decision tree consistent with some training data and the accuracy of the tree on test data. The experiments were performed on a massively parallel Maspar computer. The results of the experiments on several artificial and two real world problems indicate that, for many of the problems investigated, smaller consistent decision trees are on average less accurate than the average accuracy of slightly larger trees.

/pdf/exploring-the-decision-forest-an-empirical-investigation-of-30rmrf9til.pdf

Exploring the decision forest: an empirical investigation of Occam's razor in decision tree induction

Exploring the Decision Forest: An Empirical Investigation of Occam's Razor in Decision Tree Induction

We describe CLIPS-R, a theory revision system for the revision of CLIPS rule-bases. CLIPS-R differs from previous theory revision systems in that it operates on forward chaining production systems. Revision of production system rule-bases is important because production systems can perform a variety of tasks such as monitoring and design in addition to classification tasks that have been addressed by previous research. We show that CLIPS-R can take advantage of a variety of user specified constraints on the correct processing of instances, such as ordering constraints on the displaying of information, and the contents of the final fact list. In addition, we show that CLIPS-R can operate as well as existing systems when the only constraint on processing an instance is the correct classification of the instance.

Patrick M. Murphy

Papers

Reducing misclassification costs

ID2-of-3: Constructive Induction of M-of-N Concepts for Discriminators in Decision Trees

Exploring the decision forest: an empirical investigation of Occam's razor in decision tree induction

Exploring the Decision Forest: An Empirical Investigation of Occam's Razor in Decision Tree Induction

Revision of production system rule-bases