Understanding Class Imbalance

64 min
Block 13 — Class imbalance
Objective
define class imbalance rigorously and measure it; separate imbalance as a property of a dataset from imbalance as a problem for learning, and identify the three conditions that actually cause harm — class overlap, an insufficient absolute count of minority examples, and small-disjunct structure; establish the degrees of imbalance and the failure mode proper to each; demonstrate the vacuity of accuracy on an imbalanced set; determine what each metric measures when the classes are unequal; identify the four mechanisms by which standard algorithms fail; trace imbalance back to its source and decide what that source permits; and state the problem in the terms that govern it, which are the asymmetric costs of the two error types.
Estimated duration
75 minutes
Prerequisites
chapters 026, 027, 029, 030, 034, 035 and 049, and chapter 011 for the multiclass and multilabel vocabulary
Associated quizzes
050.1-quiz-definition-and-measurement.md to 050.7-quiz-diagnostic-protocol.md

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This lesson is part of the “Imbalanced Data and Resampling” module

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