An HMM-based over-sampling technique to improve text classification

This paper presents a novel over-sampling method based on document content to handle the class imbalance problem in text classification. The new technique, COS-HMM (Content-based Over-Sampling HMM), includes an HMM that is trained with a corpus in order to create new samples according to current documents. The HMM is treated as a document generator which can produce synthetical instances formed on what it was trained with. To demonstrate its achievement, COS-HMM is tested with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) in two medical documental corpora (OHSUMED and TREC Genomics), and is then compared with the Random Over-Sampling (ROS) and SMOTE techniques. Results suggest that the application of over-sampling strategies increases the global performance of the SVM to classify documents. Based on the empirical and statistical studies, the new method clearly outperforms the baseline method (ROS), and offers a greater performance than SMOTE in the majority of tested cases. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.