Model-agnostic Mitigation Strategies of Data Imbalance for Regression

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wibbeke, Jelke, Rohjans, Sebastian, Rauh, Andreas
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wibbeke, Jelke
Rohjans, Sebastian
Rauh, Andreas
author_facet Wibbeke, Jelke
Rohjans, Sebastian
Rauh, Andreas
contents Data imbalance persists as a pervasive challenge in regression tasks, introducing bias in model performance and undermining predictive reliability. This is particularly detrimental in applications aimed at predicting rare events that fall outside the domain of the bulk of the training data. In this study, we review the current state-of-the-art regarding sampling-based methods and cost-sensitive learning. Additionally, we propose novel approaches to mitigate model bias. To better asses the importance of data, we introduce the density-distance and density-ratio relevance functions, which effectively integrate empirical frequency of data with domain-specific preferences, offering enhanced interpretability for end-users. Furthermore, we present advanced mitigation techniques (cSMOGN and crbSMOGN), which build upon and improve existing sampling methods. In a comprehensive quantitative evaluation, we benchmark state-of-the-art methods on 10 synthetic and 42 real-world datasets, using neural networks, XGBoosting trees and Random Forest models. Our analysis reveals that while most strategies improve performance on rare samples, they often degrade it on frequent ones. We demonstrate that constructing an ensemble of models -- one trained with imbalance mitigation and another without -- can significantly reduce these negative effects. The key findings underscore the superior performance of our novel crbSMOGN sampling technique with the density-ratio relevance function for neural networks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_01486
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Model-agnostic Mitigation Strategies of Data Imbalance for Regression
Wibbeke, Jelke
Rohjans, Sebastian
Rauh, Andreas
Machine Learning
62J20 (primary) 68T05 (secondary)
I.2.6
Data imbalance persists as a pervasive challenge in regression tasks, introducing bias in model performance and undermining predictive reliability. This is particularly detrimental in applications aimed at predicting rare events that fall outside the domain of the bulk of the training data. In this study, we review the current state-of-the-art regarding sampling-based methods and cost-sensitive learning. Additionally, we propose novel approaches to mitigate model bias. To better asses the importance of data, we introduce the density-distance and density-ratio relevance functions, which effectively integrate empirical frequency of data with domain-specific preferences, offering enhanced interpretability for end-users. Furthermore, we present advanced mitigation techniques (cSMOGN and crbSMOGN), which build upon and improve existing sampling methods. In a comprehensive quantitative evaluation, we benchmark state-of-the-art methods on 10 synthetic and 42 real-world datasets, using neural networks, XGBoosting trees and Random Forest models. Our analysis reveals that while most strategies improve performance on rare samples, they often degrade it on frequent ones. We demonstrate that constructing an ensemble of models -- one trained with imbalance mitigation and another without -- can significantly reduce these negative effects. The key findings underscore the superior performance of our novel crbSMOGN sampling technique with the density-ratio relevance function for neural networks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
title Model-agnostic Mitigation Strategies of Data Imbalance for Regression
topic Machine Learning
62J20 (primary) 68T05 (secondary)
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01486