A Novel Ensemble Framework Based on K-Means and Resampling for Imbalanced Data

Imbalanced classification is one of the most important problems of machine learning and data mining, existing in many real datasets. In the past, many basic classifiers such as SVM, KNN, and so on have been used for imbalanced datasets in which the number of one sample is larger than that of another, but the classification effect is not ideal. Some data preprocessing methods have been proposed to reduce the imbalance ratio of data sets and combine with the basic classifiers to get better performance. In order to improve the whole classification accuracy, we propose a novel classifier ensemble framework based on K-means and resampling technique (EKR). First, we divide the data samples in the majority class into several sub-clusters using K-means, k-value is determined by Average Silhouette Coefficient, and then adjust the number of data samples of each sub-cluster to be the same as that of the minority classes through resampling technology, after that each adjusted sub-cluster and the minority class are combined into several balanced subsets, the base classifier is trained on each balanced subset separately, and finally integrated into a strong ensemble classifier. In this paper, the extensive experimental results on 16 imbalanced datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm in terms of multiple evaluation criteria, and EKR can achieve better performance when compared with several classical imbalanced classification algorithms using different data preprocessing methods.