REMEDIAL-HwR: Tackling multilabel imbalance through label decoupling and data resampling hybridization

The learning from imbalanced data is a deeply studied problem in standard classification and, in recent times, also in multilabel classification. A handful of multilabel resampling methods have been proposed in late years, aiming to balance the labels distribution. However, these methods have to face a new obstacle, specific for multilabel data, as is the joint appearance of minority and majority labels in the same data patterns. We presented recently a new algorithm designed to decouple imbalanced labels concurring in the same instance, called REMEDIAL (REsampling MultilabEl datasets by Decoupling highly ImbAlanced Labels). The goal of this work is to propose REMEDIAL-HwR (REMEDIAL Hybridization with Resampling), a procedure to hybridize this method with some of the best resampling algorithms available in the literature, including random oversampling, heuristic undersampling and synthetic sample generation techniques. These hybrid methods are then empirically analyzed, determining how their behavior is influenced by the label decoupling process. The analysis of results shows that the proposed method improves certain classifiers performance when it is applied over imbalanced datasets with label concurrence. In addition, a noteworthy set of guidelines on the combined use of these techniques can be drawn from the conducted experimentation. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.