Managing Imbalanced Data Sets in Multi-label Problems: A Case Study with the SMOTE Algorithm

摘要

Multi-label learning has been becoming an increasingly active area into the machine learning community since a wide variety of real world problems are naturally multi-labeled. However, it is not uncommon to find disparities among the number of samples of each class, which constitutes an additional challenge for the learning algorithm. SMOTE is an oversampling technique that has been successfully applied for balancing single-labeled data sets, but has not been used in multi-label frameworks so far. In this work, several strategies are proposed and compared in order to generate synthetic samples for balancing data sets in the training of multi-label algorithms. Results show that a correct selection of seed samples for oversampling improves the classification performance of multi-label algorithms. The uniform generation oversampling, provides an efficient methodology for a wide scope of real world problems.