Learning on the border: active learning in imbalanced data classification

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the class imbalance problem which has been known to hinder the learning performance of classification algorithms. The problem occurs when there are significantly less number of observations of the target concept. Various real-world classification tasks, such as medical diagnosis, text categorization and fraud detection suffer from this phenomenon. The standard machine learning algorithms yield better prediction performance with balanced datasets. In this paper, we demonstrate that active learning is capable of solving the class imbalance problem by providing the learner more balanced classes. We also propose an efficient way of selecting informative instances from a smaller pool of samples for active learning which does not necessitate a search through the entire dataset. The proposed method yields an efficient querying system and allows active learning to be applied to very large datasets. Our experimental results show that with an early stopping criteria, active learning achieves a fast solution with competitive prediction performance in imbalanced data classification.