Rough-Fuzzy Based Synthetic Data Generation Exploring Boundary Region of Rough Sets to Handle Class Imbalance Problem

Abstract

Class imbalance is a prevalent problem that not only reduces the performance of the machine learning techniques but also causes the lacking of the inherent complex characteristics of data. Though the researchers have proposed various ways to deal with the problem, they have yet to consider how to select a proper treatment, especially when uncertainty levels are high. Applying rough-fuzzy theory to the imbalanced data learning problem could be a promising research direction that generates the synthetic data and removes the outliers. The proposed work identifies the positive, boundary, and negative regions of the target set using the rough set theory and removes the objects in the negative region as outliers. It also explores the positive and boundary regions of the rough set by applying the fuzzy theory to generate the samples of the minority class and remove the samples of the majority class. Thus the proposed rough-fuzzy approach performs both oversampling and undersampling to handle the imbalanced class problem. The experimental results demonstrate that the novel technique allows qualitative and quantitative data handling.

Keywords

• class imbalanced problem
• feature selection
• rough set theory
• fuzzy theory
• resampling
• machine learning