Imbalanced Data Classification via Cooperative Interaction Between Classifier and Generator

IEEE Trans Neural Netw Learn Syst. 2022 Aug;33(8):3343-3356. doi: 10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3052243. Epub 2022 Aug 3.

Abstract

Learning classifiers with imbalanced data can be strongly biased toward the majority class. To address this issue, several methods have been proposed using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Existing GAN-based methods, however, do not effectively utilize the relationship between a classifier and a generator. This article proposes a novel three-player structure consisting of a discriminator, a generator, and a classifier, along with decision boundary regularization. Our method is distinctive in which the generator is trained in cooperation with the classifier to provide minority samples that gradually expand the minority decision region, improving performance for imbalanced data classification. The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on real data sets as well as synthetic imbalanced data sets.