Robust Universum Twin Support Vector Machine for Imbalanced Data

Abstract

One of the major difficulties in machine learning methods is categorizing datasets that are imbalanced. This problem may lead to biased models, where the training process is dominated by the majority class, resulting in inadequate representation of the minority class. Universum twin support vector machine (UTSVM) produces a biased model towards the majority class, as a result, its performance on the minority class is often poor as it might be mistakenly classified as noise. Moreover, UTSVM is not proficient in handling datasets that contain outliers and noises. Inspired by the concept of incorporating prior information about the data and employing an intuitionistic fuzzy membership scheme, we propose intuitionistic fuzzy universum twin support vector machines for imbalanced data (IFUTSVM-ID) by enhancing overall robustness. We use an intuitionistic fuzzy membership scheme to mitigate the impact of noise and outliers. Moreover, to tackle the problem of imbalanced class distribution, data oversampling and undersampling methods are utilized. Prior knowledge about the data is provided by universum data. This leads to better generalization performance. UTSVM is susceptible to overfitting risks due to the omission of the structural risk minimization (SRM) principle in their primal formulations. However, the proposed IFUTSVM-ID model incorporates the SRM principle through the incorporation of regularization terms, effectively addressing the issue of overfitting. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed IFUTSVM-ID model on benchmark datasets from KEEL and compare it with existing baseline models. Furthermore, to assess the effectiveness of the proposed IFUTSVM-ID model in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease (AD), we applied them to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset. Experimental results showcase the superiority of the proposed IFUTSVM-ID models compared to the baseline models. The supplementary material of the paper can be accessed using the following link: https://github.com/mtanveer1/IFUTSVM-ID. © 2025 IEEE.