Distribution Learning Based on Evolutionary Algorithm-Assisted Deep Neural Networks for Imbalanced Image Classification

Imbalanced image classification faces critical challenges in balancing the quality and diversity of synthetic minority samples. This article proposes the improved estimation distribution algorithm-based latent feature distribution evolution (MEDA_LUDE) algorithm, an evolutionary algorithm-assisted deep distribution learning framework that optimizes latent feature distributions through a multivariate Gaussian mixture (GM) assumption and a novel four-phase training strategy. We introduce a large-margin GM (L-GM) loss to dynamically model covariances for feature learning and design a MEDA that evolves latent features via a similarity-guided fitness function, thus enhancing diversity while preserving synthesis quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements: MEDA_LUDE achieves 95.9% accuracy on MNIST (imbalanced ratio-IR:100), surpassing state-of-the-art methods by 1.26% on CIFAR-10. For industrial fabric defect data sets, it elevates accuracy by 1.45% on DHU-FD and 0.92% on ALIYUN-FD, especially with precision and G-mean improvements of 2.5% and 1.17%, respectively, on DHU-FD. Visualizations confirm that MEDA_LUDE generates minority samples with superior quality-diversity tradeoffs. The framework’s success in real-world fabric defect classification underscores its practical value in addressing imbalanced learning challenges.