EvoSampling: A Granular Ball-based Evolutionary Hybrid Sampling with Knowledge Transfer for Imbalanced Learning

Abstract: Class imbalance would lead to biased classifiers that favor the majority class and disadvantage the minority class. Unfortunately, from a practical perspective, the minority class is of importance in many real-life applications. Hybrid sampling methods address this by oversampling the minority class to increase the number of its instances, followed by undersampling to remove low-quality instances. However, most existing sampling methods face difficulties in generating diverse high-quality instances and often fail to remove noise or low-quality instances on a larger scale effectively. This paper therefore proposes an evolutionary multi-granularity hybrid sampling method, called EvoSampling. During the oversampling process, genetic programming (GP) is used with multi-task learning to effectively and efficiently generate diverse high-quality instances. During the undersampling process, we develop a granular ball-based undersampling method that removes noise in a multi-granular fashion, thereby enhancing data quality. Experiments on 20 imbalanced datasets demonstrate that EvoSampling effectively enhances the performance of various classification algorithms by providing better datasets than existing sampling methods. Besides, ablation studies further indicate that allowing knowledge transfer accelerates the GP's evolutionary learning process.