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An Evaluation Measure for Learning from Imbalanced Data Based on Asymmetric Beta Distribution

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Classification and Data Mining

Abstract

Hand (Mach Learn 77:103–123, 2009) has shown that the AUC has a serious deficiency since it implicitly uses different misclassification cost distributions for different classifiers. Thus, using the AUC can be compared to using different metrics to evaluate different classifiers. To overcome this incoherence, the H measure was proposed, which uses a symmetric Beta distribution to replace the implicit cost weight distributions in the AUC. When learning from imbalanced data, misclassifying a minority class example is much more serious than misclassifying a majority class example. To take different misclassification costs into account, we propose using an asymmetric distribution (B42) instead of a symmetric one. Experimental results on 36 imbalanced datasets using SVMs and logistic regression show that the asymmetric B42 could be a good choice for evaluating in imbalanced data environments since it puts more weight on the minority class.

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Acknowledgements

The first author was funded by the “Teaching and Research Innovation Grant” Project of Can Tho University-Vietnam.

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Correspondence to Nguyen Thai-Nghe .

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Thai-Nghe, N., Gantner, Z., Schmidt-Thieme, L. (2013). An Evaluation Measure for Learning from Imbalanced Data Based on Asymmetric Beta Distribution. In: Giusti, A., Ritter, G., Vichi, M. (eds) Classification and Data Mining. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28894-4_15

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