The Effect of Class Distribution on Classifier Learning: An Empirical Study

In this article we analyze the effect of class distribution on classifier learning. We begin by describing the different ways in which class distribution affects learning and how it affects the evaluation of learned classifiers. We then present the results of two comprehensive experimental studies. The first study compares the performance of classifiers generated from unbalanced data sets with the performance of classifiers generated from balanced versions of the same data sets. This comparison allows us to isolate and quantify the effect that the training set’s class distribution has on learning and contrast the performance of the classifiers on the minority and majority classes. The second study assesses what distribution is "best" for training, with respect to two performance measures: classification accuracy and the area under the ROC curve (AUC). A tacit assumption behind much research on classifier induction is that the class distribution of the training data should match the “natural” distribution of the data. This study shows that the naturally occurring class distribution often is not best for learning, and often substantially better performance can be obtained by using a different class distribution. Understanding how classifier performance is affected by class distribution can help practitioners to choose training data—in real-world situations the number of training examples often must be limited due to computational costs or the costs associated with procuring and preparing the data.