Grouped-sampling technique to deal with unbalance in Raman spectral data modeling

Due to limitations in disease prevalence and hospital specificity, spectral data are often collected with unbalanced sample size. To solve this problem, a new sampling method - grouped-sampling was proposed in this research, which is shown to be effective for unbalanced data. It avoids over-fitting of over-sampling and overcomes under-sampling utilization of under-sampling. In this study, we applied grouped-sampling to two unbalanced datasets where the sample proportions are 199:40 and 75:225. And then verified from two classic models: PCA-SVM (Principal Component Analysis-Support Vector Machine) and the deep learning algorithm GoogLeNet. The accuracy of these two datasets were 85.11% and 96.15% in PCA-SVM and 85.10% and 84.61% on GoogLeNet. Also, the F1-score were evaluated to measure the classification balance of sampling method, and result shows that F1-score of grouped-sampling is always the highest compared to over-sampling and under-sampling. In summary, compared to traditional sampling methods, grouped-sampling performs better on prediction for classes with smaller sample size, which means grouped-sampling can improve the balance of classification results and the potential of practical application. Therefore, we develop a group sampling method that distinguishes between under- and over-sampling, which greatly improves the accuracy and balance of predictions for unbalanced samples.