Box drawings for learning with imbalanced data

The vast majority of real world classification problems are imbalanced, meaning there are far fewer data from the class of interest (the positive class) than from other classes. We propose two machine learning algorithms to handle highly imbalanced classification problems. The classifiers are disjun...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Goh, Siong Thye (Contributor), Rudin, Cynthia (Contributor)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center (Contributor), Sloan School of Management (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2015-10-05T16:19:53Z.
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Summary:The vast majority of real world classification problems are imbalanced, meaning there are far fewer data from the class of interest (the positive class) than from other classes. We propose two machine learning algorithms to handle highly imbalanced classification problems. The classifiers are disjunctions of conjunctions, and are created as unions of parallel axis rectangles around the positive examples, and thus have the benefit of being interpretable. The first algorithm uses mixed integer programming to optimize a weighted balance between positive and negative class accuracies. Regularization is introduced to improve generalization performance. The second method uses an approximation in order to assist with scalability. Specifically, it follows a \textit{characterize then discriminate} approach, where the positive class is characterized first by boxes, and then each box boundary becomes a separate discriminative classifier. This method has the computational advantages that it can be easily parallelized, and considers only the relevant regions of feature space.
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