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Background: Feature selection in class-imbalance learning has gained increasing attention in recent years due to the massive growth of high-dimensional class-imbalanced data across many scientific fields. In addition to reducing model complexity and discovering key biomarkers, feature selection is also an effective method of combating overlapping which may arise in such data and become a crucial aspect for determining classification performance. However, ordinary feature selection techniques for classification can not be simply used for addressing class-imbalanced data without any adjustment. Thus, more efficient feature selection technique must be developed for complicated class-imbalanced data, especially in the context of high-dimensionality. Results: We proposed an algorithm called sssHD to achieve stable sparse feature selection applied it to complicated class-imbalanced data. sssHD is based on the Hellinger distance (HD) coupled with sparse regularization techniques. We stated that Hellinger distance is not only class-insensitive but also translation-invariant. Simulation result indicates that HD-based selection algorithm is effective in recognizing key features and control false discoveries for class-imbalance learning. Five gene expression datasets are also employed to test the performance of the sssHD algorithm, and a comparison with several existing selection procedures is performed. The result shows that sssHD is highly competitive in terms of five assessment metrics. In addition, sssHD presents limited differences between performing and not performing re-balance preprocessing. Conclusions: sssHD is a practical feature selection method for high-dimensional class-imbalanced data, which is simple and can be an alternative for performing feature selection in class-imbalanced data. sssHD can be easily extended by connecting it with different re-balance preprocessing, different sparse regularization structures as well as different classifiers. As such, the algorithm is extremely general and has a wide range of applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection or elimination methods have been widely used to mine high-dimensional data from many fields such as biomedicine. However, classical feature selection methods usually focus on class-balanced and numerical data, and the classification performance is poor when processing class-imbalanced or mixed-type data. Moreover, existing studies hardly consider the co-occurrence of both class-imbalance and mixture of numerical and nominal features. In this paper, we propose an adaptive loss backward feature elimination method for class-imbalanced and mixed-type data (FEIM). In FEIM, a technique to convert and decompose nominal features is employed to process mixed-type data. Meanwhile, an adaptive loss function is proposed to make the classifier pay more attention to the minority class. In experiments, the effectiveness and stability of FEIM are synthetically evaluated against seven medical diagnostic datasets in terms of the measurements of F measurement and precision, and the results of feature selection are analyzed in detail. The experimental results show that, compared with three common methods (Recursive Feature Elimination SVM (RFE-SVM), Relief, and Holdout Algorithm for Backward Feature Elimination (HO-BFE)), FEIM can achieve a higher classification accuracy and is more stable when the parameters are changed. On the other hand, the feature selection results of FEIM are more meaningful by processing class-imbalanced and mixed-type data. Therefore, FEIM is a competitive and effective method to process feature elimination for class-imbalanced and mixed-type biomedical data for in medical diagnosis. The supporting information is available in the electronic supplementary material. • A mixed-type feature selection algorithms called FEIM is proposed for imbalanced data with both numerical and nominal features. • An adaptive loss function is designed for class-imbalance learning. • FEIM is more stable when the model parameters are changed compared with several classical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Screening important variables for class-imbalanced data is still a challenging task. In this study, we propose an algorithm for stably selecting key variables on class-imbalanced data based on the precision-recall curve (PRC), where the PRC is utilized as the assessment criterion in the model building stage, and sparse regularized logistic regression combined with subsampling (SRLRS) is designed to perform stable variable selection. Considering the characteristic of class-imbalanced data, we also proposed classification-based partition for cross validation, as well as leaving half of majority observations out and leaving one minority observation out (LHO-LOO) for subsampling. Simulation results and real data showed that our algorithm is highly suitable for handling class-imbalanced data, and that the PRC can be an alternative evaluation criterion for model selection when handling class-imbalanced data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning from class-imbalanced data has gained increasing attention in recent years due to the massive growth of skewed data across many scientific fields such as metabolomics. Some researches show that it is not the imbalance itself which hinders the classification performance, but class overlapping do play an important role in the performance degradation when associated to class-imbalance. So alleviating the overlapping of the imbalanced data might be an effective way to improve the performance in class-imbalance learning. In this study, we propose two feature selection algorithms that aim to minimize the overlap degree between the majority and the minority, which is based on a simple assumption that decreasing overlap degree of a data set makes it more separable. The proposed MOSNS and MOSS methods are built via sparse regularization techniques. Simulation results indicate that our algorithms is effective in recognizing key features and control false discoveries for class-imbalance learning. Four class-imbalanced metabolomics data sets are also employed to test the performance of our algorithm, and a comparison with accuracy (ACC)-based and ROC-based selection procedures is performed. The result shows that our algorithms are highly competitive and can be an alternative feature selection strategy in class-imbalance learning. ● Two feature selection algorithms are proposed by minimizing the overlap of a data set. ● Sparse feature selection strategy are used in class-imbalance learning. ● The classification performance of metabolomics data can be improved by sparse feature selection and re-balance preprocessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection and rebalancing can be seen as two preprocessing ways in class‐imbalanced learning. Recently, there have been many research achievements and applications on LASSO‐type feature selection, whereas most of them are not directly designed for addressing class‐imbalanced data. In this study, we proposed a LASSO‐based stable feature selection algorithm for class‐imbalanced data analysis, and false‐positive selection (FPS) under balanced and imbalanced situations was calculated via selection frequency of each predictor in doing stable selection. The results on simulation studies and real data examples show that class imbalance contributes to avoid overselection caused by LASSO when the data are highly correlated and a lower FPS can be obtained with class‐imbalanced data than balanced one in most of cases in the same settings. A statistical explanation was given for this phenomenon. In addition, it does not need to rebalance the class‐imbalanced data for performing such LASSO‐based feature selection with a stable strategy, and to some degree, intentionally disequilibrating the balanced data could be an alternative strategy to weaken overselection and to perform biomarker identification for finding a few of most important biomarkers. A LASSO‐based stable feature selection algorithm was proposed for imbalanced data. It is not necessary to rebalance the imbalanced data with such stable feature selection strategy. Class imbalance even contributes to avoid overselection caused by LASSO when data are strongly correlated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]