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A multi-level knee point based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for AUC maximization

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Abstract

The area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is one of the widely used metrics for measuring imbalanced data classification results. Designing multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for AUC maximization problem has attracted much attention of researchers recently. However, most of these methods either search the Pareto front directly, or perform tailored convex hull search for AUC maximization. None of them take the advantage of multi-level knee points found in the process of evolution for AUC maximization. To this end, this paper proposes a multi-level knee point based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (named MKnEA-AUC) for AUC maximization on the basis of a recently developed knee point driven evolutionary algorithm for multi/many-objective optimization. In MKnEA-AUC, an adaptive clustering strategy is proposed for automatically determining the knee points on the current population. By utilizing the preference of found knee points, the evolution of the population can converge quickly. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm MKnEA-AUC on 13 widely used benchmark data sets and the experimental results demonstrate that MKnEA-AUC is superior over the state-of-the-art algorithms for AUC maximization.

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Notes

  1. https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/.

  2. https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/cjlin/libsvmtools/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61502001, 61502004), Scientific Research Startup Fund for Doctors of Anhui University, by the Academic and Technology Leader Imported Project of Anhui University (No. J01006057). This work was also supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (Grant No. 1708085MF166), Humanities and Social Sciences Project of Chinese Ministry of Education (Grant No. 18YJC870004) and Key Program of Natural Science Project of Educational Commission of Anhui Province (Grant No. KJ2017A013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Lab of Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing of Ministry of Education, Anhui University, Hefei, 230039, China

    Jianfeng Qiu, Lei Zhang, Wei Li & Fan Cheng

  2. School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei, 230039, China

    Jianfeng Qiu, Minghui Liu, Lei Zhang, Wei Li & Fan Cheng

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  1. Jianfeng Qiu
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  2. Minghui Liu
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  3. Lei Zhang
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  4. Wei Li
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  5. Fan Cheng
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Correspondence to Fan Cheng.

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Qiu, J., Liu, M., Zhang, L. et al. A multi-level knee point based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for AUC maximization. Memetic Comp. 11, 285–296 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12293-019-00280-7

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