Ensemble Learning for Solving Data Imbalance in Bankruptcy Prediction
Myoung-Jong Kim · Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems · 2009
In a classification problem, data imbalance occurs when the number of instances in one class greatly outnumbers the number of instances in the other class. Such data sets often cause a default classifier to be built due to skewed boundary and thus the reduction in the classification accuracy of such a classifier. This paper proposes a Geometric Mean-based Boosting (GM-Boost) to resolve the problem of data imbalance. Since GM-Boost introduces the notion of geometric mean, it can perform learning process considering both majority and minority sides, and reinforce the learning on misclassified data. An empirical study with bankruptcy prediction on Korea companies shows that GM-Boost has the higher classification accuracy than previous methods including Under-sampling, Over-Sampling, and AdaBoost, used in imbalanced data and robust learning performance regardless of the degree of data imbalance.