IEEE Access (Jan 2018)

Class Weights Random Forest Algorithm for Processing Class Imbalanced Medical Data

  • Min Zhu,
  • Jing Xia,
  • Xiaoqing Jin,
  • Molei Yan,
  • Guolong Cai,
  • Jing Yan,
  • Gangmin Ning

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2789428
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6
pp. 4641 – 4652

Abstract

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The classification in class imbalanced data has drawn significant interest in medical application. Most existing methods are prone to categorize the samples into the majority class, resulting in bias, in particular the insufficient identification of minority class. A kind of novel approach, class weights random forest is introduced to address the problem, by assigning individual weights for each class instead of a single weight. The validation test on UCI data sets demonstrates that for imbalanced medical data, the proposed method enhanced the overall performance of the classifier while producing high accuracy in identifying both majority and minority class.

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