arXiv AI

When Single-Dataset Conclusions Fail: A 45-Task Study of Threshold Tuning and Resampling for Imbalanced Classification

arXiv:2608. 16147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Class-imbalance handling is routinely evaluated on a single benchmark dataset, and the resulting conclusions are reported as if they were properties of the method.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

The Hidden Costs of 99% Accuracy: A Trustworthiness Audit of the Telco Customer Churn Benchmark

The paper audits the IBM Telco Customer Churn benchmark, revealing that common practices inflate performance metrics. It shows that pre‑split SMOTE boosts churn‑class F1 by 13.1 points, that isotonic regression is the best calibration method while temperature scaling fails on tree ensembles, and that the cost‑optimal decision threshold is 5–10 times lower than the F1‑optimal one, saving about $77,000 per 1,000 customers. The authors also test generalisation on Iranian Telecom and Bank churn datasets, and propose a four‑component reporting checklist with reproducible code.

By Soumyadeep Roy
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Cost-Sensitive Conformal Prediction and Human-in-the-Loop Abstention for Imbalanced High-Stakes Decision Support: A Multi-Domain Benchmark

arXiv:2607. 27143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-stakes decision systems in credit scoring, fraud detection, healthcare, and industrial safety require reliable uncertainty quantification under severe class imbalance and asymmetric error costs.

By Manpreet Singh, Akshatha Srikantha, Shyamal Lakhanpal
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

CRISP: Scalable Importance-Stratified Coresets for Imbalanced Tabular Learning

CRISP (Coreset Reduction via Importance-Stratified Pruning) is a linear-time method that reduces negative-class examples in highly imbalanced tabular datasets by allocating a budget across quantile strata of a proxy-model score and using sample weights to correct for unequal inclusion probabilities. On a production fraud dataset, CRISP cuts the training set from 25 M to about 1.70 M rows (a 93.2% reduction) while preserving 99.7% of the full-data Average Precision. In public benchmarks such as CriteoPrivateAds, CRISP consistently achieves the highest mean Average Precision across a range of majority reductions, with ablation studies highlighting budget allocation and inverse-propensity weighting as key contributors to its performance.

By Hardhik Mohanty, Indrayana Rustandi, Mohamadreza Sheibani
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Baszta: Data-Centric Fine-Tuning of a Polish Multi-Label Safety Classifier

The paper presents Baszta, a Polish multi‑label content‑safety classifier trained by fine‑tuning the 124M‑parameter allegro/herbert‑base‑cased model on five categories (hate, vulgarity, sexual content, crime, self‑harm) using a Focal + R‑Drop objective. In out‑of‑distribution evaluation on the Gadzi Język benchmark, Baszta achieves a small but statistically significant improvement in micro‑F1 over the Bielik Guard system, though the macro‑F1 advantage disappears when both models are properly tuned. The study also explores calibration techniques, showing that per‑category temperature scaling can recover performance lost by Platt scaling or isotonic regression, and discusses the trade‑offs between robust calibration and adversarial recall.

By Adam G\'orski, Mateusz J\k{a}kalak, Rafa{\l} Jakubowski
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Protocol effects on feature-based hardware-Trojan detection across Trust-Hub families

The study evaluates how the choice of test boundary affects feature‑based hardware Trojan detection across Trust‑Hub families. Using a corpus of 49,124 gates from 16 netlists, the authors compare three test settings—pooled gates, a single netlist held out, and an entire host family held out—showing that performance drops markedly when a host family is excluded. The results demonstrate that sibling benchmark variants can inflate detection metrics, and the authors recommend reporting family‑aware holdouts alongside pooled scores.

By Hang Xiao, Chuhong Xu, Kainan Zhou, Gangzhen Qian, Lu Yi
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
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Synthetic minority data is redundant or invalid: a data-dependent validity theory and a de-biased test

arXiv:2607. 20787v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For two decades, the standard remedy for class-imbalanced learning has been to fabricate synthetic minority examples, and the standard evidence of their validity has been a check that cannot fail: synthetic points are scored against the very data that generated them.

By Ahmad B. Hassanat, Ahmad S. Tarawneh, Ghada A. Altarawneh