Two-Stage Neural Network Classifier for the Data Imbalance Problem with Application to Hotspot Detection

Abstract

The data imbalance problem often occurs in nanometer VLSI applications, where normal cases far outnumber error ones. Many imbalanced data handling methods have been proposed, such as oversampling minority class samples and downsampling majority class samples. However, existing methods focus on improving the quality of minority classes while causing quality deterioration of majority ones. In this paper, we propose a two-stage classifier to handle the data imbalance problem. We first develop an iterative neural network framework to reduce false alarms. Then the oversampling method on a final classification network is applied to predict the two classes better. As a result, the data imbalance problem is well handled, and the quality deterioration of majority classes is also reduced. Since the iterative stage does not change any existing network structure, any convolutional neural network can be used in the framework. Compared with the state-of-the-art imbalanced data handling methods, experimental results on the hotspot detection problem show that our two-stage classification method achieves the best prediction accuracy and reduces false alarms significantly.