Correcting Data Imbalance for Semi-Supervised Covid-19 Detection Using X-ray Chest Images
The Corona Virus (COVID-19) is an internationalpandemic that has quickly propagated throughout the world. The application of deep learning for image classification of chest X-ray images of Covid-19 patients, could become a novel pre-diagnostic detection methodology. However, deep learning architectures require large labelled datasets. This is often a limitation when the subject of research is relatively new as in the case of the virus outbreak, where dealing with small labelled datasets is a challenge. Moreover, in the context of a new highly infectious disease, the datasets are also highly imbalanced,with few observations from positive cases of the new disease. In this work we evaluate the performance of the semi-supervised deep learning architecture known as MixMatch using a very limited number of labelled observations and highly imbalanced labelled dataset. We propose a simple approach for correcting data imbalance, re-weight each observationin the loss function, giving a higher weight to the observationscorresponding to the under-represented class. For unlabelled observations, we propose the usage of the pseudo and augmentedlabels calculated by MixMatch to choose the appropriate weight. The MixMatch method combined with the proposed pseudo-label based balance correction improved classification accuracy by up to 10 algorithm, with statistical significance. We tested our proposed approach with several available datasets using 10, 15 and 20 labelledobservations. Additionally, a new dataset is included among thetested datasets, composed of chest X-ray images of Costa Rican adult patients
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