Learning Confidence Bounds for Classification with Imbalanced Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework that uses learning theory and confidence bounds to improve classification accuracy and reliability on imbalanced datasets, addressing limitations of traditional sampling methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that incorporates class-dependent confidence bounds into the learning process to better handle class imbalance.

Findings

Framework effectively adapts to class imbalance

Improves robustness and reliability of classification

Offers a promising direction for future research

Abstract

Class imbalance poses a significant challenge in classification tasks, where traditional approaches often lead to biased models and unreliable predictions. Undersampling and oversampling techniques have been commonly employed to address this issue, yet they suffer from inherent limitations stemming from their simplistic approach such as loss of information and additional biases respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages learning theory and concentration inequalities to overcome the shortcomings of traditional solutions. We focus on understanding the uncertainty in a class-dependent manner, as captured by confidence bounds that we directly embed into the learning process. By incorporating class-dependent estimates, our method can effectively adapt to the varying degrees of imbalance across different classes, resulting in more robust and reliable classification outcomes. We empirically show how our framework provides a promising direction for handling imbalanced data in classification tasks, offering practitioners a valuable tool for building more accurate and trustworthy models.