# Binary Classification on small dataset < 200 samples

I have a dataset consisting of 181 samples(classes are not balanced there are 41 data points with 1 label and rest 140 are with label 0) and 10 features and one target variable. The 10 features are numeric and continuous in nature. I have to perform binary classification. I have done the following work:-

I have performed 3 Fold cross validation and got following accuracy results using various models:-

LinearSVC:
0.873
DecisionTreeClassifier:
0.840
Gaussian Naive Bayes:
0.845
Logistic Regression:
0.867
0.867
Support vector classifier rbf:
0.818
Random forest:
0.867
K-nearest-neighbors:
0.823


Please guide me how could I choose the best model for this size of dataset and make sure my model is not overfitting ? I am thinking of applying random under sampling to handle the unbalanced data.

• Hey Archit, did you create a test out of the data you have. If not then please do, and update the accuracies you achieve on the training and test set. Also calculate precision and recall, because if your dataset is imbalanced you might be getting a decent accuracy but your model will really fail at the test set. Update the question with these metrics please. Thanks. Jan 12 '17 at 6:40
• Could you give some more context as to what was sampled and which concept you are trying to label? Jan 12 '17 at 13:52
• @HimanshuRai I have updated the question, data is imbalanced. I am thinking of random under sampling but It would result in loss of some data points then there would be only 82 observations. What would you suggest? Jan 13 '17 at 2:51
• is it possible to public your dataset? @ArchitGarg May 11 '19 at 3:44

This post might be of interest. Basically by selecting the model with the best crossvalidation score, you already account for overfitting.

Also, you should separate your dataset into two parts. For the first one (validation) you run the crossvalidation on to select a model, in your case LinearSVC. For the second one (testing) you run crossvalidation again, but this time only with LinearSVC to get unbiased estimates of the accuracy.

Firstly your data's amount is very small for any kind of analysis, so if it was posssible to get more data then that would be better. Secondly as you mentioned that your data was imbalanced then the accuracy metrics you have posted lose all meaning, since 140 samples are of the same class, the algorithm is predicting that class for every sample. So for better evaluation calculate precision, recall and f-score. Thirdly, since your data is already less than needed don't undersample, instead oversample using the SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over Sampling Technique) implementation. Using a stratified KFold, and a Random Forest will mostly be your best bet here. But remember with this less than needed data, it would be impossible to achieve a model without underfitting or overfitting.