SelectNet: Learning to Sample from the Wild for Imbalanced Data Training

Abstract: Supervised learning from training data with imbalanced class sizes, a commonly encountered scenario in real applications such as anomaly/fraud detection, has long been considered a significant challenge in machine learning. Motivated by recent progress in curriculum and self-paced learning, we propose to adopt a semi-supervised learning paradigm by training a deep neural network, referred to as SelectNet, to selectively add unlabelled data together with their predicted labels to the training dataset. Unlike existing techniques designed to tackle the difficulty in dealing with class imbalanced training data such as resampling, cost-sensitive learning, and margin-based learning, SelectNet provides an end-to-end approach for learning from important unlabelled data "in the wild" that most likely belong to the under-sampled classes in the training data, thus gradually mitigates the imbalance in the data used for training the classifier. We demonstrate the efficacy of SelectNet through extensive numerical experiments on standard datasets in computer vision.