Dynamic Sampling Approach to Training Neural Networks for Multiclass Imbalance Classification

Class imbalance learning tackles supervised learning problems where some classes have significantly more examples than others. Most of the existing research focused only on binary-class cases. In this paper, we study multiclass imbalance problems and propose a dynamic sampling method (DyS) for multilayer perceptrons (MLP). In DyS, for each epoch of the training process, every example is fed to the current MLP and then the probability of it being selected for training the MLP is estimated. DyS dynamically selects informative data to train the MLP. In order to evaluate DyS and understand its strength and weakness, comprehensive experimental studies have been carried out. Results on 20 multiclass imbalanced data sets show that DyS can outperform the compared methods, including pre-sample methods, active learning methods, cost-sensitive methods, and boosting-type methods.