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Skewness in data classes poses a significant challenge in major research problems pertaining to data mining and machine learning (Chen & Shyu, 2013; Chen & Shyu, 2011; Lin, Ravitz, Shyu, & Chen, 2007). Classes are rated as skewed or imbalanced when their data instances are non-uniformly associated to the class label. In real world cases, most applications have some degree of skewness inherently present in the data. Such datasets are often grouped into major and minor classes, where major classes have significantly greater numbers of instances associated with them as compared to minor classes. Some prominent imbalanced dataset use cases include fraud detection, network intrusion identification, uncommon disease diagnostics, critical equipment failure, and multimedia concept sensing. A number of famous classification methods are built to utilize the dataset statistics, which ends up being biased towards the majority classes. When identifying the minor classes, these classifiers often perform inaccurately even for very large datasets with considerable numbers of training instances.
Some notable frameworks aiming to solve this challenge are proposed in (Shyu, Haruechaiyasak, & Chen, 2003; Lin, Chen, Shyu, & Chen, 2011; Meng, Liu, Shyu, Yan, & Shu, 2014; Shyu, et al., 2003; Liu, Yan, Shyu, Zhao, & Chen, 2015; Yan, Chen, Shyu, & Chen, 2015). The authors of these frameworks, along with others, target this issue from two different perspectives. The first type is algorithm-based approaches where the authors propose new frameworks or improve the existing methods using both supervised and unsupervised techniques. The second, very different type is towards the manipulation of the data itself to reduce the skewness in the class attribution. However, the problem of imbalanced classes is far from being conquered, especially in multimedia data. Multimedia data is particularly difficult because of the various data types that are layered with spatio-temporal features.
One path to handle this challenging situation would be to employ solutions from other domains of machine learning such as deep learning. Deep learning is the name of a whole family of algorithms that use graphs with multiple layers of linear and non-linear transformations to develop hierarchical learning models (Wan et al., 2014). Several frameworks have been proposed using the deep learning techniques that show promising results in application domains such as automatic speech recognition (Swietojanski, Ghoshal, & Renals, 2014), computer vision (Chen, Xiang, Liu, & Pan, 2014), and natural language processing (Mao, Dong, Huang, & Zhan, 2014). However, deep learning methods have not been used to address the problems of class-imbalance. As illustrated in Section IV of our empirical study and also presented in (Sun et al., 2013; Snoekyz et al., 2013) on the TRECVID 2015 datasets, even the famous deep learning methods such as convolutional neural network (CNN) which outperforms a multitude of conventional machine learning techniques face difficulties when dealing with the class-imbalance problems. Moreover, for big datasets in multimedia data mining, deep learning methods are very expensive on computations. The method proposed in (Karpathy et al., 2014) took more than 30 days to train with 1755 videos. The authors were only able to successfully train the deep learning framework using a near-duplicate algorithm.