KBA: Kernel boundary alignment considering imbalanced data distribution

An imbalanced training data set can pose serious problems for many real-world data mining tasks that employ SVMs to conduct supervised learning. In this paper, we propose a kernel-boundary-alignment algorithm, which considers THE training data imbalance as prior information to augment SVMs to improve class-prediction accuracy. Using a simple example, we first show that SVMs can suffer from high incidences of false negatives when the training instances of the target class are heavily outnumbered by the training instances of a nontarget class. The remedy we propose is to adjust the class boundary by modifying the kernel matrix, according to the imbalanced data distribution. Through theoretical analysis backed by empirical study, we show that our kernel-boundary-alignment algorithm works effectively on several data sets.