Abstract
Imbalanced domains are an important problem that arises in predictive tasks causing a loss in the performance of the most relevant cases for the user. This problem has been intensively studied for classification problems. Recently it was recognized that imbalanced domains occur in several other contexts and for a diversity of types of tasks. This paper focus on imbalanced regression tasks. Resampling strategies are among the most successful approaches to imbalanced domains. In this work we propose variants of existing resampling strategies that are able to take into account the information regarding the neighborhood of the examples. Instead of performing sampling uniformly, our proposals bias the strategies for reinforcing some regions of the data sets. In an extensive set of experiments we provide evidence of the advantage of introducing a neighborhood bias in the resampling strategies.

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Abstract
Accounting for misclassification costs is important in many practical applications of machine learning, and cost sensitive techniques for classification have been studied extensively. Utility-based learning provides a generalization of purely cost-based approaches that considers both costs and benefits, enabling application to domains with complex cost-benefit settings. However, there is little work on utility- or cost-based learning for regression. In this paper, we formally define the problem of utility-based regression and propose a strategy for maximizing the utility of regression models. We verify our findings in a large set of experiments that show the advantage of our proposal in a diverse set of domains, learning algorithms and cost/benefit settings.

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