Extrapolated Markov Chain Oversampling Method for Imbalanced Text Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Avela, Aleksi, Ilmonen, Pauliina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Avela, Aleksi
Ilmonen, Pauliina
author_facet Avela, Aleksi
Ilmonen, Pauliina
contents Text classification is the task of automatically assigning text documents correct labels from a predefined set of categories. In real-life (text) classification tasks, observations and misclassification costs are often unevenly distributed between the classes - known as the problem of imbalanced data. Synthetic oversampling is a popular approach to imbalanced classification. The idea is to generate synthetic observations in the minority class to balance the classes in the training set. Many general-purpose oversampling methods can be applied to text data; however, imbalanced text data poses a number of distinctive difficulties that stem from the unique nature of text compared to other domains. One such factor is that when the sample size of text increases, the sample vocabulary (i.e., feature space) is likely to grow as well. We introduce a novel Markov chain based text oversampling method. The transition probabilities are estimated from the minority class but also partly from the majority class, thus allowing the minority feature space to expand in oversampling. We evaluate our approach against prominent oversampling methods and show that our approach is able to produce highly competitive results against the other methods in several real data examples, especially when the imbalance is severe.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02332
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Extrapolated Markov Chain Oversampling Method for Imbalanced Text Classification
Avela, Aleksi
Ilmonen, Pauliina
Machine Learning
Text classification is the task of automatically assigning text documents correct labels from a predefined set of categories. In real-life (text) classification tasks, observations and misclassification costs are often unevenly distributed between the classes - known as the problem of imbalanced data. Synthetic oversampling is a popular approach to imbalanced classification. The idea is to generate synthetic observations in the minority class to balance the classes in the training set. Many general-purpose oversampling methods can be applied to text data; however, imbalanced text data poses a number of distinctive difficulties that stem from the unique nature of text compared to other domains. One such factor is that when the sample size of text increases, the sample vocabulary (i.e., feature space) is likely to grow as well. We introduce a novel Markov chain based text oversampling method. The transition probabilities are estimated from the minority class but also partly from the majority class, thus allowing the minority feature space to expand in oversampling. We evaluate our approach against prominent oversampling methods and show that our approach is able to produce highly competitive results against the other methods in several real data examples, especially when the imbalance is severe.
title Extrapolated Markov Chain Oversampling Method for Imbalanced Text Classification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02332