A study with class imbalance and random sampling for a decision tree learning system

Abstract

Sampling methods are a direct approach to tackle the problem of class imbalance. These methods sample a data set in order to alter the class distributions. Usually these methods are applied to obtain a more balanced distribution. An open-ended question about sampling methods is which distribution can provide the best results, if any. In this work we develop a broad empirical study aiming to provide more insights into this question. Our results suggest that altering the class distribution can improve the classification performance of classifiers considering AUC as a performance metric. Furthermore, as a general recommendation, random over-sampling to balance distribution is a good starting point in order to deal with class imbalance. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.