How to handle unbalanced label data using FastText?

Question

In FastText, I have unbalanced labels. What is the best way to handle it?

This blog https://machinelearningmastery.com/tactics-to-combat-imbalanced-classes-in-your-machine-learning-dataset/ gives some general answers can you add some details as to the domain specifics? — Veltzer Doron, Jun 26 '18 at 15:55
I dont see any satisfactory answer. is there a better resolution? — Anuj Gupta, Sep 21 '18 at 04:46

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 12 '18 at 10:39

2

Fasttext seems to handle unbalanced data pretty well. According to the FAQ

Note also that this loss is thought for classes that are unbalanced, that is some classes are more frequent than others.

answered Jul 12 '18 at 10:39

Remzouz

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7

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 21 '19 at 12:20

In our case here we have a very skewed dataset with 200+ classes and 20% of the classes containing 80% of all data.

In our data, even with this highly skewed data, we have a clear definition of the texts inside our categories.

Example: Text of the Majority Class: "Hey, I need a computer and a mouse to open the internet and post a programming answer in Stack Overflow"

Text of the Minority Class: "Hey, could please give me the following items: Eggs, lettuce, onions, tomatoes, milk and wheat?"

As FastText deals with WordNGrams and hierarchical split if you have a very well defined category as my case above, the imbalance it's not a problem because of the nature of the algorithm.

Reference: Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification - Armand Joulin, Edouard Grave, Piotr Bojanowski, Tomas Mikolov

How to handle unbalanced label data using FastText?

2 Answers2