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Challenges learning from imbalanced data using tree-based models: Prevalence estimates systematically depend on hyperparameters and can be upwardly biased

Imbalanced binary classification problems arise in many fields of study. When using machine learning models for these problems, it is common to subsample the majority class (i.e., undersampling) to create a (more) balanced dataset for model training. This biases the model's predictions because the model learns from a dataset that does not follow the same data generating process as new data. One way of accounting for this bias is to analytically map the resulting predictions to new values based on the sampling rate for the majority class, which was used to create the training dataset. While this approach may work well for some machine learning models, we have found that calibrating a random forest this way has unintended negative consequences, including prevalence estimates that can be upwardly biased. These prevalence estimates depend on both i) the number of predictors considered at each split in the random forest; and ii) the sampling rate used. We explain the former using known properties of random forests and analytical calibration. However, in investigating the latter issue, we made a surprising discovery - contrary to the widespread belief that decision trees are biased towards the majority class, they actually can be biased towards the minority class.

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