On the Impact of Class Imbalance on the Learning Dynamics of Deep Neural Networks:An Intuitive Insight

Class imbalance in deep neural networks (DNNs) has witnessed a rapid increase in research attention in recent years. However, the varying accounts of the reasons behind the poor performance of DNN on imbalance data in pertinent literature shows that little is known about how this agelong phenomenon impacts the performance of DNNs. A better understanding of this problem is crucial to developing effective DNN-based imbalance methods. Thus, this study systematically investigates the impact of class imbalance on the learning dynamics of DNN by monitoring the learning pattern of DNN models on both the majority and minority classes of datasets of varying imbalance ratios. Experimental findings shows that as against learning from balanced datasets where DNN learns the classes similarly, class imbalance has severe deteriorating impact on the performance of DNN, driving the model to underfit the minority class samples in the early training epochs while simultaneously learning only the majority class. Although DNN ultimately learns the minority samples, learning in this manner only results in learnt minority representations that are non-generalizable at test phase because they are merely overfitted to keep the overall training loss as low as possible.