Approaches to Imbalanced Classes

Data Skeptic

• Episode: Approaches to Imbalanced Classes
• Website: Data Skeptic
• Feed URL: https://dataskeptic.com/api/blog/rss
• Published: 2017-03-15 01:00

I had a listener named Scott write in after listening to our episode called The Library Problem and ask an interesting question. In this episode, I explained how using machine learning to predict whether or not a book would be returned has an imbalanced dataset. The vast majority of transactions at the library are "good" ones, meaning the patron brings the book back. Worse, the truly interesting class you'd like to predict and avoid (i.e. books that won't be returned) has the minority of examples in your training