arXiv Machine Learning

Density-Ratio Rescoring for Imbalanced Classification Using Raking Duals and Classifier Scores

Density‑Ratio Rescoring (DRR) enhances a classifier trained with the original class prior by adding a survey‑raking dual score that reweights the majority class to match minority feature moments within a tolerance. The method standardizes both the dual and base scores, combines them with equal weight, and uses the fitted dual directly for prediction without resampling or refitting the base model. Experiments on 24 tabular benchmarks and a gene‑expression cohort show that DRR improves average precision over the standardized base on every dataset, with a mean gain of 0.034, and outperforms a shared‑dual raking‑and‑relabeling resampler on most datasets.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Rethinking Class Imbalance for Single-Cell Foundation Models: A Systematic Benchmark Across Architectures and Long-Tail Loss Functions

The paper benchmarks six long‑tail loss functions—cross‑entropy, weighted CE, class‑balanced loss, focal loss, LDAM, and logit‑adjusted softmax—across three single‑cell foundation model architectures (scGPT, scBERT, Geneformer) and three datasets (Multiple Sclerosis, Zheng68K, human Pancreas). It shows that overall accuracy masks systematic failures on rare, disease‑relevant cell types, with a consistent gap between overall accuracy, Macro‑F1, and rare‑class recall under plain cross‑entropy. The study identifies two distinct regimes of rare‑class failure, predicts reweighting efficacy by absolute training‑set size, and finds class‑balanced loss and LDAM to be the most reliable across all settings.

By Zeyu Dong, Jiahui Zhong
arXiv Statistics ML
Aug 25

Robust performance metrics for imbalanced classification problems

The paper demonstrates that common binary classification metrics—Matthews' correlation coefficient, Cohen's κ, the F-score, and the Jaccard similarity—are not robust to extreme class imbalance, as the Bayes classifier’s true positive rate tends to zero when the minority class proportion vanishes. To address this, the authors propose robustified versions of these metrics that include a tuning parameter, ensuring that the Bayes-optimal classifier’s threshold remains bounded and its true positive rate stays above zero even in highly imbalanced scenarios. The study provides theoretical bounds, simulation results, and practical guidance on applying these robust metrics to real data, such as a credit‑default dataset, and discusses their relationship to ROC and precision‑recall curves.

By Hajo Holzmann, Bernhard Klar
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

When Does Synthetic Data Augmentation Improve Score-Based Imbalanced Classification?

Synthetic data augmentation is widely used to mitigate class imbalance, but its theoretical effects on score-based classification remain poorly understood. This paper develops a framework for characterizing when synthetic minority augmentation can improve threshold-integrated and threshold-optimized metrics, including AUROC, AUPRC, best-threshold balanced accuracy, and best-threshold \(\F_1\) score.

arXiv AI
Jul 21

Data Balancing Strategies: A Systematic Survey of Resampling and Augmentation Methods

arXiv:2505. 13518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Imbalanced datasets, where one class significantly outnumbers others, remain a persistent challenge in machine learning, often biasing predictions toward the majority class and degrading classifier performance.

By Behnam Yousefimehr, Mehdi Ghatee, Javad Fazli, Shervin Ghaffari, Zahra Rafei, Mohammad Amin Seifi, Sajed Tavakoli, Abolfazl Nikahd, Mahdi Razi Gandomani, Alireza Orouji, Ramtin Mahmoudi Kashani, Sarina Heshmati, Negin Sadat Mousavi