Last Updated on August 27, 2020 A common mistake made by beginners is to apply machine learning algorithms to a problem without establishing a performance baseline. A performance baseline provides a minimum score above which a model is considered to have skill on the dataset. It also provides a point of relative improvement for all models evaluated on the dataset. A baseline can be established using a naive classifier, such as predicting one class label for all examples in the […]

Last Updated on August 28, 2020 Imbalanced datasets are those where there is a severe skew in the class distribution, such as 1:100 or 1:1000 examples in the minority class to the majority class. This bias in the training dataset can influence many machine learning algorithms, leading some to ignore the minority class entirely. This is a problem as it is typically the minority class on which predictions are most important. One approach to addressing the problem of class imbalance […]

Last Updated on August 18, 2020 Imbalanced Classification Crash Course.Get on top of imbalanced classification in 7 days. Classification predictive modeling is the task of assigning a label to an example. Imbalanced classification are those classification tasks where the distribution of examples across the classes is not equal. Practical imbalanced classification requires the use of a suite of specialized techniques, data preparation techniques, learning algorithms, and performance metrics. In this crash course, you will discover how you can get started […]

Last Updated on August 21, 2020 Imbalanced classification involves developing predictive models on classification datasets that have a severe class imbalance. The challenge of working with imbalanced datasets is that most machine learning techniques will ignore, and in turn have poor performance on, the minority class, although typically it is performance on the minority class that is most important. One approach to addressing imbalanced datasets is to oversample the minority class. The simplest approach involves duplicating examples in the minority […]

Last Updated on January 20, 2020 Resampling methods are designed to change the composition of a training dataset for an imbalanced classification task. Most of the attention of resampling methods for imbalanced classification is put on oversampling the minority class. Nevertheless, a suite of techniques has been developed for undersampling the majority class that can be used in conjunction with effective oversampling methods. There are many different types of undersampling techniques, although most can be grouped into those that select […]

Last Updated on August 21, 2020 Resampling methods are designed to add or remove examples from the training dataset in order to change the class distribution. Once the class distributions are more balanced, the suite of standard machine learning classification algorithms can be fit successfully on the transformed datasets. Oversampling methods duplicate or create new synthetic examples in the minority class, whereas undersampling methods delete or merge examples in the majority class. Both types of resampling can be effective when […]

Machine learning techniques often fail or give misleadingly optimistic performance on classification datasets with an imbalanced class distribution. The reason is that many machine learning algorithms are designed to operate on classification data with an equal number of observations for each class. When this is not the case, algorithms can learn that very few examples are not important and can be ignored in order to achieve good performance. Data sampling provides a collection of techniques that transform a training dataset […]

Last Updated on August 28, 2020 Logistic regression does not support imbalanced classification directly. Instead, the training algorithm used to fit the logistic regression model must be modified to take the skewed distribution into account. This can be achieved by specifying a class weighting configuration that is used to influence the amount that logistic regression coefficients are updated during training. The weighting can penalize the model less for errors made on examples from the majority class and penalize the model […]

Last Updated on August 21, 2020 The decision tree algorithm is effective for balanced classification, although it does not perform well on imbalanced datasets. The split points of the tree are chosen to best separate examples into two groups with minimum mixing. When both groups are dominated by examples from one class, the criterion used to select a split point will see good separation, when in fact, the examples from the minority class are being ignored. This problem can be […]

Last Updated on August 21, 2020 The Support Vector Machine algorithm is effective for balanced classification, although it does not perform well on imbalanced datasets. The SVM algorithm finds a hyperplane decision boundary that best splits the examples into two classes. The split is made soft through the use of a margin that allows some points to be misclassified. By default, this margin favors the majority class on imbalanced datasets, although it can be updated to take the importance of […]