Rethinking Cost-Sensitive Classification in Deep Learning via Adversarial Data Augmentation

Cost-sensitive classification is critical in applications where misclassification errors widely vary in cost. However, overparameterization poses fundamental challenges to the cost-sensitive modeling of deep neural networks (DNNs). The ability of a DNN to fully interpolate a training data set can render a DNN, evaluated purely on the training set, ineffective in distinguishing a cost-sensitive solution from its overall accuracy maximization counterpart. This necessitates rethinking cost-sensitive classification in DNNs. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a cost-sensitive adversarial data augmentation (CSADA) framework to make overparameterized models cost sensitive. The overarching idea is to generate targeted adversarial examples that push the decision boundary in cost-aware directions. These targeted adversarial samples are generated by maximizing the probability of critical misclassifications and used to train a model with more conservative decisions on costly pairs. Experiments on well-known data sets and a pharmacy medication image (PMI) data set, made publicly available, show that our method can effectively minimize the overall cost and reduce critical errors while achieving comparable overall accuracy.