Deep Learning and Data Sampling with Imbalanced Big Data

This study evaluates the use of deep learning and data sampling on a class-imbalanced Big Data problem, i.e. Medicare fraud detection. Medicare offers affordable health insurance to the elderly population and serves more than 15% of the United States population. To increase transparency and help reduce fraud, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have made several data sets publicly available for analysis. Our research group has conducted several studies using CMS data and traditional machine learning algorithms (non-deep learning), but challenges associated with severe class imbalance leave room for improvement. These previous studies serve as baselines as we employ deep neural networks with various data-sampling techniques to determine the efficacy of deep learning in addressing class imbalance. Random over-sampling (ROS), random under-sampling (RUS), and combinations of the two (ROS-RUS) are applied to study how varying levels of class imbalance impact model training and performance. Classwise performance is maximized by identifying optimal decision thresholds, and a strong linear relationship between minority class size and optimal threshold is observed. Results show that ROS significantly outperforms RUS, combining RUS and ROS both maximizes performance and efficiency with a 4× speedup in training time, and the default threshold of 0.5 is never optimal when training data is imbalanced. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide statistical results comparing ROS, RUS, and ROS-RUS deep learning methods across a range of class distributions. Additional contributions include a unique analysis of thresholding as it relates to the minority class size and state-of-the-art performance on the given fraud detection task.