Cost-sensitive learning for imbalanced medical data: a review

Integrating Machine Learning (ML) in medicine has unlocked many opportunities to harness complex medical data, enhancing patient outcomes and advancing the field. However, the inherent imbalanced distribution of medical data poses a significant challenge, resulting in biased ML models that perform poorly on minority classes. Mitigating the impact of class imbalance has prompted researchers to explore various strategies, wherein Cost-Sensitive Learning (CSL) arises as a promising approach to improve the accuracy and reliability of ML models. This paper presents the first review of CSL for imbalanced medical data. A comprehensive exploration of the existing literature encompassed papers published from January 2010 to December 2022 and sourced from five major digital libraries. A total of 173 papers were selected, analysed, and classified based on key criteria, including publication years, channels and sources, research types, empirical types, medical sub-fields, medical tasks, CSL approaches, strengths and weaknesses of CSL, frequently used datasets and data types, evaluation metrics, and development tools. The results indicate a noteworthy publication rise, particularly since 2020, and a strong preference for CSL direct approaches. Data type analysis unveiled diverse modalities, with medical images prevailing. The underutilisation of cost-related metrics and the prevalence of Python as the primary programming tool are highlighted. The strengths and weaknesses analysis covered three aspects: CSL strategy, CSL approaches, and relevant works. This study serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking to explore the current state of research, identify strengths and gaps in the existing literature and advance CSL’s application for imbalanced medical data.