VOS: a Method for Variational Oversampling of Imbalanced Data

Class imbalanced datasets are common in real-world applications that range from credit card fraud detection to rare disease diagnostics. Several popular classification algorithms assume that classes are approximately balanced, and hence build the accompanying objective function to maximize an overall accuracy rate. In these situations, optimizing the overall accuracy will lead to highly skewed predictions towards the majority class. Moreover, the negative business impact resulting from false positives (positive samples incorrectly classified as negative) can be detrimental. Many methods have been proposed to address the class imbalance problem, including methods such as over-sampling, under-sampling and cost-sensitive methods. In this paper, we consider the over-sampling method, where the aim is to augment the original dataset with synthetically created observations of the minority classes. In particular, inspired by the recent advances in generative modelling techniques (e.g., Variational Inference and Generative Adversarial Networks), we introduce a new oversampling technique based on variational autoencoders. Our experiments show that the new method is superior in augmenting datasets for downstream classification tasks when compared to traditional oversampling methods.

On the EM-Tau algorithm: a new EM-style algorithm with partial E-steps

The EM algorithm is one of many important tools in the field of statistics. While often used for imputing missing data, its widespread applications include other common statistical tasks, such as clustering. In clustering, the EM algorithm assumes a parametric distribution for the clusters, whose parameters are estimated through a novel iterative procedure that is based on the theory of maximum likelihood. However, one major drawback of the EM algorithm, that renders it impractical especially when working with large datasets, is that it often requires several passes of the data before convergence. In this paper, we introduce a new EM-style algorithm that implements a novel policy for performing partial E-steps. We call the new algorithm the EM-Tau algorithm, which can approximate the traditional EM algorithm with high accuracy but with only a fraction of the running time.