Improving virtual sample generation for small sample learning with dependent attributes

Since the product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter, the issue of small data set learning has drawn more and more attentions in both academics and enterprises. Many methods have been proposed to improve the learning performance of small data set. In these methods, the virtual sample generation approach is the most popular technique for improving small data learning. In the process of virtual sample generation, the attribute independence in small data is the key part to determine the learning performance, because it is the necessary assumption before generating virtual samples. However, in the real world, attributes in the data set usually are not mutual independent. Therefore, this paper proposes a new process to generate independent virtual samples based on the box-and-whisker plot domain estimation. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, one data set is used to calculate the classification accuracy average and standard deviation based on the support vector machine. The results of the experiment show that the presented method has a superior classification performance than other methods.