Classification of imbalanced data using a modified fuzzy-neighbor weighted approach

Abstract

Classification of imbalanced datasets is one of the widely explored challenges of the decade. The imbalance occurs in many real world datasets due to uneven distribution of data into classes, i.e. one class has more instances while others have a few that results in the biased performances of traditional classifiers towards the majority class with large number of instances and ignorance of other classes with less data. Many solutions have been proposed to deal with this issue in various crisp and fuzzy methods. This paper proposes a new hybrid fuzzy weighted nearest neighbor approach to find better overall classification performance for both minority and majority classes of imbalanced data. Benefits of neighbor weighted K nearest neighbor approach i.e. assignment of large weights to small classes and small weights to large classes are merged with fuzzy logic. Fuzzy classification helps in classifying objects more adequately as it determines that how much an object belongs to a class. Experimental results exhibit the improvements in classification of imbalanced data of different imbalance ratios in comparison with other methods.