A proposal for evolutionary fuzzy systems using feature weighting: Dealing with overlapping in imbalanced datasets

Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization Based Preprocessing of Multi-Class Extremely Imbalanced Datasets

Today’s datasets are usually very large with many features and making analysis on such datasets is really a tedious task. Especially when performing classification, selecting attributes that are salient for the process is a brainstorming task. It is more difficult when there are many class labels for the target class attribute and hence many researchers have introduced methods to select features for performing classification on multi-class attributes. The process becomes more tedious when the attribute values are imbalanced for which researchers have contributed many methods. But, there is no sufficient research to handle extreme imbalance and feature selection together and hence this paper aims to bridge this gap. Here Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), an efficient evolutionary algorithm is used to handle imbalanced dataset and feature selection process is also enhanced with the required functionalities. First, Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization is used to transform the imbalanced datasets into balanced one and then another version of Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization is used to select the significant features. The proposed methodology is applied on eight multi-class extremely imbalanced datasets and the experimental results are found to be better than other existing methods in terms of classification accuracy, G mean, F measure. The results validated by using Friedman test also confirm that the proposed methodology effectively balances the dataset with less number of features than other methods.

Unveiling the relevance of traffic enforcement cameras on the severity of vehicle-pedestrian collisions in an urban environment with machine learning models

PURPOSE

One of the leading causes of violent fatalities around the world is road traffic collisions, and pedestrians are among the most vulnerable road users with respect to such incidents. Since walking is highly promoted in urban areas to alleviate motor-vehicle externalities, it is paramount to understand the causes associated with vehicle-pedestrian collisions and their severity to provide safe environments. Although traffic enforcement cameras can address vehicle-vehicle collisions, little is known about their effectiveness with respect to vehicle-pedestrian incidents.

METHODOLOGY

In this study, we trained a set of machine learning models to forecast if a vehicle-pedestrian collision will turn into an injury or fatality, and the most suitable model was used to investigate the contributing features associated with such events with emphasis on the impact of traffic enforcement cameras. In addition to traffic enforcement camera proximity, features associated with the collision, weather, vehicle, victim, and infrastructure are included in the model to reduce unobserved heterogeneity.

RESULTS

Results show that a Linear Discriminant Analysis model surpasses other machine learning models considering the evaluation metrics. Results reveal that the age and gender of the victim, the involvement of larger vehicles in the collision, and the quality of the illumination are the causes associated with pedestrian fatalities. On the other hand, involvement of motorcycles and collisions that occurred in densely populated locations are the causes associated with pedestrian injuries.

CONCLUSIONS

This investigation demonstrates how to articulate machine learning into a vehicle-pedestrian crash analysis to understand the direction and magnitude of covariates in the corresponding severity outcome. Furthermore, it highlights the remarkable effect that traffic enforcement cameras and other features have on vehicle-pedestrian crash severity. These results provide actionable guidance for educational campaigns, enhanced traffic engineering, and infrastructure improvements that could be implemented in the analyzed region to provide safer transportation.

A Boundary-Information-Based Oversampling Approach to Improve Learning Performance for Imbalanced Datasets

Oversampling is the most popular data preprocessing technique. It makes traditional classifiers available for learning from imbalanced data. Through an overall review of oversampling techniques (oversamplers), we find that some of them can be regarded as danger-information-based oversamplers (DIBOs) that create samples near danger areas to make it possible for these positive examples to be correctly classified, and others are safe-information-based oversamplers (SIBOs) that create samples near safe areas to increase the correct rate of predicted positive values. However, DIBOs cause misclassification of too many negative examples in the overlapped areas, and SIBOs cause incorrect classification of too many borderline positive examples. Based on their advantages and disadvantages, a boundary-information-based oversampler (BIBO) is proposed. First, a concept of boundary information that considers safe information and dangerous information at the same time is proposed that makes created samples near decision boundaries. The experimental results show that DIBOs and BIBO perform better than SIBOs on the basic metrics of recall and negative class precision; SIBOs and BIBO perform better than DIBOs on the basic metrics for specificity and positive class precision, and BIBO is better than both of DIBOs and SIBOs in terms of integrated metrics.

Entropy difference and kernel-based oversampling technique for imbalanced data learning

Class imbalance is often a problem in various real-world datasets, where one class contains a small number of data and the other contains a large number of data. It is notably difficult to develop an effective model using traditional data mining and machine learning algorithms without using data preprocessing techniques to balance the dataset. Oversampling is often used as a pretreatment method for imbalanced datasets. Specifically, synthetic oversampling techniques focus on balancing the number of training instances between the majority class and the minority class by generating extra artificial minority class instances. However, the current oversampling techniques simply consider the imbalance of quantity and pay no attention to whether the distribution is balanced or not. Therefore, this paper proposes an entropy difference and kernel-based SMOTE (EDKS) which considers the imbalance degree of dataset from distribution by entropy difference and overcomes the limitation of SMOTE for nonlinear problems by oversampling in the feature space of support vector machine classifier. First, the EDKS method maps the input data into a feature space to increase the separability of the data. Then EDKS calculates the entropy difference in kernel space, determines the majority class and minority class, and finds the sparse regions in the minority class. Moreover, the proposed method balances the data distribution by synthesizing new instances and evaluating its retention capability. Our algorithm can effectively distinguish those datasets with the same imbalance ratio but different distribution. The experimental study evaluates and compares the performance of our method against state-of-the-art algorithms, and then demonstrates that the proposed approach is competitive with the state-of-art algorithms on multiple benchmark imbalanced datasets.

A Pareto-based Ensemble with Feature and Instance Selection for Learning from Multi-Class Imbalanced Datasets

Imbalanced classification is related to those problems that have an uneven distribution among classes. In addition to the former, when instances are located into the overlapped areas, the correct modeling of the problem becomes harder. Current solutions for both issues are often focused on the binary case study, as multi-class datasets require an additional effort to be addressed. In this research, we overcome these problems by carrying out a combination between feature and instance selections. Feature selection will allow simplifying the overlapping areas easing the generation of rules to distinguish among the classes. Selection of instances from all classes will address the imbalance itself by finding the most appropriate class distribution for the learning task, as well as possibly removing noise and difficult borderline examples. For the sake of obtaining an optimal joint set of features and instances, we embedded the searching for both parameters in a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm, using the C4.5 decision tree as baseline classifier in this wrapper approach. The multi-objective scheme allows taking a double advantage: the search space becomes broader, and we may provide a set of different solutions in order to build an ensemble of classifiers. This proposal has been contrasted versus several state-of-the-art solutions on imbalanced classification showing excellent results in both binary and multi-class problems.