A Statistical Perspective of Neural Networks for Imbalanced Data Problems

It has been an interesting challenge to find a good classifier for imbalanced data, since it is pervasive but a difficult problem to solve. However, classifiers developed with the assumption of well-balanced class distributions show poor classification performance for the imbalanced data. Among many approaches to the imbalanced data problems, the algorithmic level approach is attractive because it can be applied to the other approaches such as data level or ensemble approaches. Especially, the error back-propagation algorithm using the target node method, which can change the amount of weight-updating with regards to the target node of each class, attains good performances in the imbalanced data problems. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between two optimal outputs of neural network classifier trained with the target node method. Also, the optimal relationship is compared with those of the other error function methods such as mean-squared error and the n-th order extension of cross-entropy error. The analyses are verified through simulations on a thyroid data set.