Neural Networks Learn Specified Information for Imbalanced Data Classification

Imbalanced data problem is a classic topic in artificial intelligence. Neural network approaches to solve this problem mostly rely on resampling or reweighting strategies. However, these methods severely suffer from the learning bias in most cases when the empirical representation of known samples is insufficient. One-class learning can provide an ideal classification property to alleviate this critical issue. However, extending one-class learning to imbalanced data presents problems of hypersphere collapse, ambiguous interclass relations, and compact representations. In this paper, a new one-class learning paradigm is proposed for binary imbalanced data classification. Specifically, a neural network is employed to map known samples to a specified attribute space to solve the problems of hypersphere collapse and ambiguous interclass relations. Then, to alleviate the compact representation problem, a dynamic information potential energy is developed to disperse the mapped majority samples to fill the specified region as much as possible. The proposed method is validated on 34 imbalanced datasets with imbalanced ratios ranging from 16.90 to 100.14. The test results show that the proposed method achieves the best performance on more than half of the test datasets.