Analysis of preprocessing vs. cost-sensitive learning for imbalanced classification. Open problems on intrinsic data characteristics

Class imbalance is among the most persistent complications which may confront the traditional supervised learning task in real-world applications. The problem occurs, in the binary case, when the number of instances in one class significantly outnumbers the number of instances in the other class. This situation is a handicap when trying to identify the minority class, as the learning algorithms are not usually adapted to such characteristics.The approaches to deal with the problem of imbalanced datasets fall into two major categories: data sampling and algorithmic modification. Cost-sensitive learning solutions incorporating both the data and algorithm level approaches assume higher misclassification costs with samples in the minority class and seek to minimize high cost errors. Nevertheless, there is not a full exhaustive comparison between those models which can help us to determine the most appropriate one under different scenarios.The main objective of this work is to analyze the performance of data level proposals against algorithm level proposals focusing in cost-sensitive models and versus a hybrid procedure that combines those two approaches. We will show, by means of a statistical comparative analysis, that we cannot highlight an unique approach among the rest. This will lead to a discussion about the data intrinsic characteristics of the imbalanced classification problem which will help to follow new paths that can lead to the improvement of current models mainly focusing on class overlap and dataset shift in imbalanced classification.

► We compare preprocessing and cost-sensitive learning when dealing with imbalance.
► The approaches used to deal with imbalance improve the overall performance.
► Preprocessing and cost-sensitive learning are analogous ways to deal with imbalance.
► We have to focus on the data intrinsic characteristics of the imbalanced datasets.
► To improve models, class overlap and dataset shift in imbalance must be considered.