Book Image

Machine Learning for Imbalanced Data

By : Kumar Abhishek, Dr. Mounir Abdelaziz
Book Image

Machine Learning for Imbalanced Data

By: Kumar Abhishek, Dr. Mounir Abdelaziz

Overview of this book

As machine learning practitioners, we often encounter imbalanced datasets in which one class has considerably fewer instances than the other. Many machine learning algorithms assume an equilibrium between majority and minority classes, leading to suboptimal performance on imbalanced data. This comprehensive guide helps you address this class imbalance to significantly improve model performance. Machine Learning for Imbalanced Data begins by introducing you to the challenges posed by imbalanced datasets and the importance of addressing these issues. It then guides you through techniques that enhance the performance of classical machine learning models when using imbalanced data, including various sampling and cost-sensitive learning methods. As you progress, you’ll delve into similar and more advanced techniques for deep learning models, employing PyTorch as the primary framework. Throughout the book, hands-on examples will provide working and reproducible code that’ll demonstrate the practical implementation of each technique. By the end of this book, you’ll be adept at identifying and addressing class imbalances and confidently applying various techniques, including sampling, cost-sensitive techniques, and threshold adjustment, while using traditional machine learning or deep learning models.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Data-level techniques for text classification

Data imbalance, wherein certain classes in a dataset are underrepresented, is not just an issue confined to image or structured data domains. In NLP, imbalanced datasets can lead to biased models that might perform well on the majority class but are likely to misclassify underrepresented ones. To address this challenge, numerous strategies have been devised.

In NLP, data augmentation can boost model performance, especially with limited training data. Table 7.3 categorizes the various data augmentation techniques for text data:

Level

Method

Description

Example techniques

Character level

Noise

Introducing randomness at the character level

Jumbling characters

Rule-based

...