Adversarial Approaches to Tackle Imbalanced Data in Machine Learning

Real-world applications often involve imbalanced datasets, which have different distributions of examples across various classes. When building a system that requires a high accuracy, the performance of the classifiers is crucial. However, imbalanced datasets can lead to a poor classification performance and conventional techniques, such as synthetic minority oversampling technique. As a result, this study proposed a balance between the datasets using adversarial learning methods such as generative adversarial networks. The model evaluated the effect of data augmentation on both the balanced and imbalanced datasets. The study evaluated the classification performance on three different datasets and applied data augmentation techniques to generate the synthetic data for the minority class. Before the augmentation, a decision tree was applied to identify the classification accuracy of all three datasets. The obtained classification accuracies were 79.9%, 94.1%, and 72.6%. A decision tree was used to evaluate the performance of the data augmentation, and the results showed that the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 82.7%, 95.7%, and 76% on a highly imbalanced dataset. This study demonstrates the potential of using data augmentation to improve the classification performance in imbalanced datasets.

Blockchain-Based Electronic Health Record System for Efficient Covid-19 Pandemic Management (preprint)

Electronic Health Record (EHR) is being used in most healthcare institutions to preserve and share health records instead of a paper-based method. Data records must be exchanged amongst various parties and users' privileges to manage access to their records should also be provided. In addition to the basic standards of secrecy, confidentiality and integrity of information, these facts further demonstrate the need for interoperability and consumer control to access their personal data. Electronic Health Record (EHR) system faces issues of protection of data, trust and management issues. In recent Covid-19 pandemic, various applications, tools and websites were launched that stores records. Also, many personal records related to health need to be shared among different parties for early detection, contact tracing, monitoring and the future prediction that requires accurate and reliable data. Simultaneously, the citizens will be hesitant in providing their personal details due to privacy concerns and social stigma. Blockchain technology has arisen as a powerful technology that can offer the immutability, confidentiality and user access properties of stored information and provided distributed storage. This paper analyses the blockchain suitability in EHR and its further applications in efficient Covid-19 pandemic management.