Abstract. Learning from unbalanced datasets presents a convoluted problem in which traditional learning algorithms may perform poorly. The objective functions used for learning the classifiers typically tend to favor the larger, less important classes in such problems. This paper compares the performance of several popular decision tree splitting criteria -information gain, Gini measure, and DKM -and identifies a new skew insensitive measure in Hellinger distance. We outline the strengths of Hellinger distance in class imbalance, propose its application in forming decision trees, and perform a comprehensive comparative analysis between each decision tree construction method. In addition, we consider the performance of each tree within a powerful sampling wrapper framework to capture the interaction of the splitting metric and sampling. We evaluate over this wide range of datasets and determine which operate best under class imbalance.
In REF , authors outline the performance of several popular decision tree splitting criteria -information gain, Gini measure, and DKM -can be used to form decision trees, and improve performances of tree construction method applied to unbalanced data.
Learning Decision Trees for Unbalanced Data
In European Conference on Machine Learning
Mathematics Computer Science