Multiple Balance Subsets Stacking for Imbalanced Healthcare Datasets

摘要

Accurate prediction is highly important for clinical decision making and early treatment. In this paper, we study the imbalanced data problem in prediction, a key challenge existing in the healthcare area. Imbalanced datasets bias classifiers towards the majority class, leading to an unsatisfied classification prediction performance on the minority class, which is known as imbalance problem. Existing imbalance learning methods may suffer from issues like information loss, overfitting, and high training time cost. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel ensemble learning method called Multiple bAlance Subsets Stacking (MASS) by exploiting a multiple balance subsets construction strategy. Furthermore, we improve MASS with introducing parallelism (Parallel MASS) to reduce the training time cost. We evaluate MASS on three real-world healthcare datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that its prediction performance outperforms the state-of-art methods in terms of AUC, F1-score and MCC. Through the speedup analysis, Parallel MASS reduces the training time cost greatly on large dataset, and its speedup increases as the data size grows.