| Abstract | Deep learning has recently unleashed the ability for Machine learning (ML) to make unparalleled strides. It did so by confronting and successfully addressing, at least to a certain extent, the knowledge bottleneck that paralyzed ML and artificial intelligence for decades. The community is currently basking in deep learning’s success, but a question that comes to mind is: have all of the issues previously affecting machine learning systems been solved by deep learning or do some issues remain for which deep learning is not a bulletproof solution? This question in the context of the class imbalance becomes a motivation for this paper. Imbalance problem was first recognized almost three decades ago and has remained a critical challenge at least for traditional learning approaches. Our goal is to investigate whether the tight dependency between class imbalances, concept complexities, dataset size and classifier performance, known to exist in traditional learning systems, is alleviated in any way in deep learning approaches and to what extent, if any, network depth and regularization can help. To answer these questions we conduct a survey of the recent literature focused on deep learning and the class imbalance problem as well as a series of controlled experiments on both artificial and real-world domains. This allows us to formulate lessons learned about the impact of class imbalance on deep learning models, as well as pose open challenges that should be tackled by researchers in this field. |
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