A Multi-Objective Ensemble Method for Class Imbalance Learning: Application in Prediction of Life Expectancy Post Thoracic Surgery

This article describes how class imbalance learning has attracted great attention in recent years as many real world domain applications suffer from this problem. Imbalanced class distribution occurs when the number of training examples for one class far surpasses the training examples of the other class often the one that is of more interest. This problem may produce an important deterioration of the classifier performance, in particular with patterns belonging to the less represented classes. Toward this end, the authors developed a hybrid model to address the class imbalance learning with focus on binary class problems. This model combines benefits of the ensemble classifiers with a multi objective feature selection technique to achieve higher classification performance. The authors' model also proposes non-dominated sets of features. Then they evaluate the performance of the proposed model by comparing its results with notable algorithms for solving imbalanced data problem. Finally, the authors utilize the proposed model in medical domain of predicting life expectancy in post-operative of thoracic surgery patients.