使用PA算法解决类不平衡的在线特征选择问题
Online Feature Selection of Class Imbalance via PA Algorithm
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摘要: 在机器学习的许多实际应用领域中,数据集会出现类不平衡问题,即多数(或正)类中样本的数量远远多于少数(或负)类中样本的数量。解决类不平衡问题的技术有很多,其中对于高维的类不平衡数据集,特征选择方法能够提高分类器的性能和减少计算代价。但是,大多数有关特征选择和类不平衡的研究都局限于批量学习,而这些方法并不适合所有的实际应用,比如在线学习。本文,我们的目的是使用特征选择技术提高类不平衡的在线学习分类器的性能,即只使用一小部分特征正确、有效地高维的在线的类不平衡数据集。我们提出了两种在线学习算法,使得在线分类器能够选择类不平衡数据集中一小部分特征分类一序列类不平衡的在线数据。这两种学习算法都是基于优化问题和迭代方法的思想,使用Passive-Aggressive (PA)算法和截断梯度(Truncated Gradient, TG)算法解决。我们提供了两种策略修改PA算法,提高其在类不平衡数据集上分类性能。一种是修改PA的损失函数,为多数类样本和少数类样本设置不同的间隔阈值;另一种是人工合成一部分少数类样本。我们测试了多个实际的数据集评估算法的性能,实验结果证明了我们提出的算法能够有效地解决类不平衡的在线特征选择问题。Abstract: Imbalance classification techniques have been frequently applied in many machine learning application domains where the number of the majority (or positive) class of a dataset is much larger than that of the minority (or negative) class. Meanwhile, feature selection (FS) is one of the key techniques for the high-dimensional classification task in a manner which greatly improves the classification performance and the computational efficiency. However, most studies of feature selection and imbalance classification are restricted to off-line batch learning, which is not well adapted to some practical scenarios. In this paper, we aim to solve high-dimensional imbalanced classification problem accurately and efficiently with only a small number of active features in an online fashion, and we propose two novel online learning algorithms for this purpose. In our approach, a classifier which involves only a small and fixed number of features is constructed to classify a sequence of imbalanced data received in an online manner. We formulate the construction of such online learner into an optimization problem and use an iterative approach to solve the problem based on the passive-aggressive (PA) algorithm as well as a truncated gradient (TG) method. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms based on several real-world datasets, and our experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in comparison with the baselines.