Cost Sensitive Evaluation of Instance Hardness in Machine Learning

Abstract

Measuring hardness of individual instances in machine learning contributes to a deeper analysis of learning performance. This work proposes instance hardness measures for binary classification in cost-sensitive scenarios. Here cost curves are generated for each instance, defined as the loss observed for a pool of learning models for that instance along the range of cost proportions. Instance hardness is defined as the area under the cost curves and can be seen as an expected loss of difficulty along cost proportions. Different cost curves were proposed by considering common decision threshold choice methods in literature, thus providing alternative views of instance hardness.