Sparse representation-based classification (SRC) has been widely used because it just relies on simple linear regression ideas to do classification, and it does not need learning. However, the performance of SRC is limited by needing sufficient labeled samples per class and the sensitivity to class imbalance. For tackling these problems, an improved SRC model is constructed in this paper. For alleviating the problem of insufficient labeled samples, an unlabeled data-driven inverse projection sparse representation-based classification model is constructed to achieve effective and stable representation and recognition results. The L 1/2 and S 1/2 regularizations are introduced to capture the sparsity of 1-D and 2-D, and to make the model have good statistical properties. Moreover, the cost-sensitive strategy is integrated into the model's classification criteria to improve the imbalance of class distribution adaptively, especially for multiclass imbalanced data. A solver utilizing the mixed Gauss-Seidel and Jacobian ADMM algorithm is developed to obtain the approximate solution. Experiments on common public test databases show that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the latest published results and some deep-learning algorithms.