Zero-Inflated Binary Classification Model with Elastic Net Regularization

Zero inflation and overfitting can reduce the accuracy rate of using machine learning models for characterizing binary data sets. A zero-inflated Bernoulli (ZIBer) model can be the right model to characterize zero-inflated binary data sets. When the ZIBer model is used to characterize zero-inflated binary data sets, overcoming the overfitting problem is still an open question. To improve the overfitting problem for using the ZIBer model, the minus log-likelihood function of the ZIBer model with the elastic net regularization rule for an overfitting penalty is proposed as the loss function. An estimation procedure to minimize the loss function is developed in this study using the gradient descent method (GDM) with the momentum term as the learning rate. The proposed estimation method has two advantages. First, the proposed estimation method can be a general method that simultaneously uses L 1 - and L 2 -norm terms for penalty and includes the ridge and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator methods as special cases. Second, the momentum learning rate can accelerate the convergence of the GDM and enhance the computation efficiency of the proposed estimation procedure. The parameter selection strategy is studied, and the performance of the proposed method is evaluated using Monte Carlo simulations. A diabetes example is used as an illustration.