WOA + BRNN: An imbalanced big data classification framework using Whale optimization and deep neural network

Nowadays, big data plays a substantial part in information knowledge analysis, manipulation, and forecasting. Analyzing and extracting knowledge from such big datasets are a very challenging task due to the imbalance of data distribution, which could lead to a biased classification results and wrong decisions. The standard classifiers are not capable of handling such datasets. Hence, a new technique for dealing with such datasets is required. This paper proposes a novel classification framework for big data that consists of three developed phases. The first phase is the feature selection phase, which uses the Whale optimization algorithm (WOA) for finding the best set of features. The second phase is the preprocessing phase, which uses the SMOTE algorithm and the LSH-SMOTE algorithm for solving the class imbalance problem. Lastly, the third phase is WOA + BRNN algorithm, which is using the Whale optimization algorithm for training a deep learning approach called bidirectional recurrent neural network for the first time. Our proposed algorithm WOA-BRNN has been tested against nine highly imbalanced datasets one of them is big dataset in terms of area under curve (AUC) against four of the most common use machine learning algorithms (Naïve Bayes, AdaBoostM1, decision table, random tree), in addition to GWO-MLP (training multilayer perceptron using Gray Wolf Optimizer), then we test our algorithm over four well-known datasets against GWO-MLP and particle swarm optimization (PSO-MLP), genetic algorithm (GA-MLP), ant colony optimization (ACO-MLP), evolution strategy (ES-MLP), and population-based incremental learning (PBIL-MLP) in terms of classification accuracy. Experimental results proved that our proposed algorithm WOA + BRNN has achieved promising accuracy and high local optima avoidance, and outperformed four of the most common use machine learning algorithms, and GWO-MLP in terms of AUC.