Similarity Based Stratified Splitting: an approach to train better classifiers

We propose a Similarity-Based Stratified Splitting (SBSS) technique, which uses both the output and input space information to split the data. The splits are generated using similarity functions among samples to place similar samples in different splits. This approach allows for a better representation of the data in the training phase. This strategy leads to a more realistic performance estimation when used in real-world applications. We evaluate our proposal in twenty-two benchmark datasets with classifiers such as Multi-Layer Perceptron, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and K-Nearest Neighbors, and five similarity functions Cityblock, Chebyshev, Cosine, Correlation, and Euclidean. According to the Wilcoxon Sign-Rank test, our approach consistently outperformed ordinary stratified 10-fold cross-validation in 75% of the assessed scenarios.