In k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) classifier, a query instance is classified based on the most frequent class of its nearest neighbors among the training instances. In imbalanced datasets, kNN becomes biased towards the majority instances of the training space. To solve this problem, we propose a method called Proximity weighted Evidential kNN classifier. In this method, each neighbor of a query instance is considered as a piece of evidence from which we calculate the probability of class label given feature values to provide more preference to the minority instances. This is then discounted by the proximity of the neighbor to prioritize the closer instances in the local neighborhood. These evidences are then combined using Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. A rigorous experiment over 30 benchmark imbalanced datasets shows that our method performs better compared to 12 popular methods. In pairwise comparison of these 12 methods with our method, in the best case, our method wins in 29 datasets, and in the worst case it wins in least 19 datasets. More importantly, according to Friedman test the proposed method ranks higher than all other methods in terms of AUC at 5% level of significance.

This paper introduces a new splitting criterion called Inter-node Hellinger Distance (iHD) and a weighted version of it (iHDw) for constructing decision trees. iHD measures the distance between the parent and each of the child nodes in a split using Hellinger distance. We prove that this ensures the mutual exclusiveness between the child nodes. The weight term in iHDw is concerned with the purity of individual child node considering the class imbalance problem. The combination of the distance and weight term in iHDw thus favors a partition where child nodes are purer and mutually exclusive, and skew insensitive. We perform an experiment over twenty balanced and twenty imbalanced datasets. The results show that decision trees based on iHD win against six other state-of-the-art methods on at least 14 balanced and 10 imbalanced datasets. We also observe that adding the weight to iHD improves the performance of decision trees on imbalanced datasets. Moreover, according to the result of the Friedman test, this improvement is statistically significant compared to other methods.

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