I\'m working in a sentiment analysis problem the data looks like this:
label instances
5 1190
4 838
3 239
1 204
2 127
Lot of very detailed answers here but I don't think you are answering the right questions. As I understand the question, there are two concerns:
You can use most of the scoring functions in scikit-learn with both multiclass problem as with single class problems. Ex.:
from sklearn.metrics import precision_recall_fscore_support as score
predicted = [1,2,3,4,5,1,2,1,1,4,5]
y_test = [1,2,3,4,5,1,2,1,1,4,1]
precision, recall, fscore, support = score(y_test, predicted)
print('precision: {}'.format(precision))
print('recall: {}'.format(recall))
print('fscore: {}'.format(fscore))
print('support: {}'.format(support))
This way you end up with tangible and interpretable numbers for each of the classes.
| Label | Precision | Recall | FScore | Support |
|-------|-----------|--------|--------|---------|
| 1 | 94% | 83% | 0.88 | 204 |
| 2 | 71% | 50% | 0.54 | 127 |
| ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
| 4 | 80% | 98% | 0.89 | 838 |
| 5 | 93% | 81% | 0.91 | 1190 |
Then...
... you can tell if the unbalanced data is even a problem. If the scoring for the less represented classes (class 1 and 2) are lower than for the classes with more training samples (class 4 and 5) then you know that the unbalanced data is in fact a problem, and you can act accordingly, as described in some of the other answers in this thread. However, if the same class distribution is present in the data you want to predict on, your unbalanced training data is a good representative of the data, and hence, the unbalance is a good thing.