A first attempt on global evolutionary undersampling for imbalanced big data

Abstract

The design of efficient big data learning models has become a common need in a great number of applications. The massive amounts of available data may hinder the use of traditional data mining techniques, especially when evolutionary algorithms are involved as a key step. Existing solutions typically follow a divide-and-conquer approach in which the data is split into several chunks that are addressed individually. Next, the partial knowledge acquired from every slice of data is aggregated in multiple ways to solve the entire problem. However, these approaches are missing a global view of the data as a whole, which may result in less accurate models. In this work we carry out a first attempt on the design of a global evolutionary undersampling model for imbalanced classification problems. These are characterised by having a highly skewed distribution of classes in which evolutionary models are being used to balance the dataset by selecting only the most relevant data. Using Apache Spark as big data technology, we have introduced a number of variations to the well-known CHC algorithm to work with very large chromosomes and reduce the costs associated to the fitness evaluation. We discuss some preliminary results, showing the great potential of this new kind of evolutionary big data model.