Introduction: Special issue on computational intelligence methods for big data and information analytics

Abstract

Incremental learning has been investigated by many researchers. However, only few works have considered the situation where class imbalance occurs. In this paper, class imbalanced incremental learning was investigated and an ensemble-based method, named Selective Further Learning (SFL) was proposed. In SFL, a hybrid ensemble of Naive Bayes (NB) and Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) were employed. For the ensemble of MLPs, parts of the MLPs were selected to learning from the new data set. Negative Correlation Learning (NCL) with Dynamic Sampling (DyS) for handling class imbalance was used as the basic training method. Besides, as an additive model, Naive Bayes was employed as an individual of the ensemble to learn the data sets incrementally. A group of weights (with the number of the classes as the length) are updated for every individual of the ensemble to indicate the confidence of the individual learning about the classes. The ensemble combines all of the individuals by weighted average according to the weights. Experiments on 3 synthetic data sets and 10 real world data sets showed that SFL was able to handle class imbalance incremental learning and outperform a recently related approach.