next up previous
Next: Introduction

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 16 (2002), 321 -- 357. Submitted 09/01; published 06/02.
©2002 AI Access Foundation and Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. All rights reserved.

SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique

Nitesh V. Chawla1, Kevin W. Bowyer2,
Lawrence O. Hall1, W. Philip Kegelmeyer3

1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, ENB 118
University of South Florida
4202 E. Fowler Ave.
Tampa, FL 33620-5399, USA
2Department of Computer Science and Engineering
384 Fitzpatrick Hall
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
3Sandia National Laboratories
Biosystems Research Department, P.O. Box 969, MS 9951
Livermore, CA, 94551-0969, USA

chawla@csee.usf.edu, kwb@cse.nd.edu, hall@csee.usf.edu, wpk@ca.sandia.gov

Abstract:

An approach to the construction of classifiers from imbalanced datasets is described. A dataset is imbalanced if the classification categories are not approximately equally represented. Often real-world data sets are predominately composed of ``normal'' examples with only a small percentage of ``abnormal'' or ``interesting'' examples. It is also the case that the cost of misclassifying an abnormal (interesting) example as a normal example is often much higher than the cost of the reverse error. Under-sampling of the majority (normal) class has been proposed as a good means of increasing the sensitivity of a classifier to the minority class. This paper shows that a combination of our method of over-sampling the minority (abnormal) class and under-sampling the majority (normal) class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space) than only under-sampling the majority class. This paper also shows that a combination of our method of over-sampling the minority class and under-sampling the majority class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space) than varying the loss ratios in Ripper or class priors in Naive Bayes. Our method of over-sampling the minority class involves creating synthetic minority class examples. Experiments are performed using C4.5, Ripper and a Naive Bayes classifier. The method is evaluated using the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC) and the ROC convex hull strategy.



 
next up previous
Next: Introduction
Nitesh Chawla (CS)
6/2/2002