Cost-Based Classifier Evaluation for Imbalanced Problems

Abstract

A common assumption made in the field of Pattern Recognition is that the priors inherent to the class distributions in the training set are representative of the true class distributions. However this assumption does not always hold, since the true class-distributions may be different, and in fact may vary significantly. The implication of this is that the effect on cost for a given classifier may be worse than expected. In this paper we address this issue, discussing a theoretical framework and methodology to assess the effect on cost for a classifier in imbalanced conditions. The methodology can be applied to many different types of costs. Some artificial experiments show how the methodology can be used to assess and compare classifiers. It is observed that classifiers that model the underlying distributions well are more resilient to changes in the true class distribution than weaker classifiers.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.