Integrating selective pre-processing of imbalanced data with Ivotes ensemble

Abstract

In the paper we present a new framework for improving classifiers learned from imbalanced data. This framework integrates the SPIDER method for selective data pre-processing with the Ivotes ensemble. The goal of such integration is to obtain improved balance between the sensitivity and specificity for the minority class in comparison to a single classifier combined with SPIDER, and to keep overall accuracy on a similar level. The IIvotes framework was evaluated in a series of experiments, in which we tested its performance with two types of component classifiers (tree- and rule-based). The results show that IIvotes improves evaluation measures. They demonstrated advantages of the abstaining mechanism (i.e., refraining from predictions by component classifiers) in IIvotes rule ensembles. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.