An ensemble technique for multi class imbalanced problem using probabilistic neural networks

The class imbalanced problem is one of the major difficulties encountered by many researchers when using classification tools. Multi class problems are especially severe in this regard. The main objective of this study is to propose a suitable technique to handle multi class imbalanced problem. Probabilistic neural network (PNN) is used as the classification tool and the directional prediction of Australian, United States and Srilankan stock market indices is considered as the application. We propose an ensemble technique to handle multi class imbalanced problem that is called multi class undersampling based bagging (MCUB) technique. This is a new initiative that has not been considered in the literature to handle multi class imbalanced problem by employing PNN. The results obtained demonstrate that the proposed MCUB technique is capable of handling multi class imbalanced problem. Therefore, the PNN with the proposed ensemble technique can be used effectively in data classification. As a further study, other classification tools can be used to investigate the performance of the proposed MCUB technique in solving class imbalanced problems.