Conditional self-attention generative adversarial network with differential evolution algorithm for imbalanced data classification

Imbalanced data classification is an important research topic in real-world applications, like fault diagnosis in an aircraft manufacturing system. The over-sampling method is often used to solve this problem. It generates samples according to the distance between minority data. However, the traditional over-sampling method may change the original data distribution, which is harmful to the classification performance. In this paper, we propose a new method called Conditional Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network with Differential Evolution (CSAGAN-DE) for imbalanced data classification. The new method aims at improving the classification performance of minority data by enhancing the quality of the generation of minority data. In CSAGAN-DE, the minority data are fed into the self-attention generative adversarial network to approximate the data distribution and create new data for the minority class. Then, the differential evolution algorithm is employed to automatically determine the number of generated minority data for achieving a satisfactory classification performance. Several experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the new CSAGAN-DE method. The results show that the new method can efficiently improve the classification performance compared with other related methods.