Data and R code for the Win-Vector blog post “Does Balancing Classes Improve Classifier Performance?” http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2015/02/does-balancing-classes-improve-classifier-performance/ Data from: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/ISOLET Source: Creators: Ron Cole and Mark Fanty Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Oregon Graduate Institute, Beaverton, OR 97006. cole '@' cse.ogi.edu, fanty '@' cse.ogi.edu Donor: Tom Dietterich Department of Computer Science Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331 tgd '@' cs.orst.edu Data Set Information: This data set was generated as follows.q 150 subjects spoke the name of each letter of the alphabet twice. Hence, we have 52 training examples from each speaker. The speakers are grouped into sets of 30 speakers each, and are referred to as isolet1, isolet2, isolet3, isolet4, and isolet5. The data appears in isolet1+2+3+4.data in sequential order, first the speakers from isolet1, then isolet2, and so on. The test set, isolet5, is a separate file. You will note that 3 examples are missing. I believe they were dropped due to difficulties in recording. I believe this is a good domain for a noisy, perceptual task. It is also a very good domain for testing the scaling abilities of algorithms. For example, C4.5 on this domain is slower than backpropagation! I have formatted the data for C4.5 and provided a C4.5-style names file as well. Attribute Information: The features are described in the paper by Cole and Fanty cited above. The features include spectral coefficients; contour features, sonorant features, pre-sonorant features, and post-sonorant features. Exact order of appearance of the features is not known. Relevant Papers: Fanty, M., Cole, R. (1991). Spoken letter recognition. In Lippman, R. P., Moody, J., and Touretzky, D. S. (Eds). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 3. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Dietterich, T. G., Bakiri, G. (1991) Error-correcting output codes: A general method for improving multiclass inductive learning programs. Proceedings of the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-91), Anaheim, CA: AAAI Press. Dietterich, T. G., Bakiri, G. (1994) Solving Multiclass Learning Problems via Error-Correcting Output Codes.