A novel generative adversarial networks modelling for the class imbalance problem in high dimensional omics data.

Journal: BMC medical informatics and decision making
Published Date:

Abstract

Class imbalance remains a large problem in high-throughput omics analyses, causing bias towards the over-represented class when training machine learning-based classifiers. Oversampling is a common method used to balance classes, allowing for better generalization of the training data. More naive approaches can introduce other biases into the data, being especially sensitive to inaccuracies in the training data, a problem considering the characteristically noisy data obtained in healthcare. This is especially a problem with high-dimensional data. A generative adversarial network-based method is proposed for creating synthetic samples from small, high-dimensional data, to improve upon other more naive generative approaches. The method was compared with 'synthetic minority over-sampling technique' (SMOTE) and 'random oversampling' (RO). Generative methods were validated by training classifiers on the balanced data.

Authors

  • Samuel Cusworth
    Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
  • Georgios V Gkoutos
    Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, Centre for Computational Biology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom; Institute of Translational Medicine, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom; NIHR Surgical Reconstruction and Microbiology Research Centre, University Hospital Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom; MRC Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), London, United Kingdom; NIHR Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre, Birmingham, United Kingdom; NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, University Hospital Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom.
  • Animesh Acharjee
    College of Medicine and Health, School of Medical Sciences, Cancer and Genomic Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom.