In recent years, numerous screening methods have been published for ultrahigh-dimensional data that contain hundreds of thousands of features; however, most of these features cannot handle data with thousands of classes. Prediction models built to authenticate users based on multichannel biometric data result in this type of problem. In this study, we present a novel method known as random forest-based multiround screening (RFMS) that can be effectively applied under such circumstances. The proposed algorithm divides the feature space into small subsets and executes a series of partial model builds. These partial models are used to implement tournament-based sorting and the selection of features based on their importance. To benchmark RFMS, a synthetic biometric feature space generator known as BiometricBlender is employed. Based on the results, the RFMS is on par with industry-standard feature screening methods while simultaneously possessing many advantages over these methods.

Class imbalance presents a major hurdle in the application of data mining methods. A common practice to deal with it is to create ensembles of classifiers that learn from resampled balanced data. For example, bagged decision trees combined with random undersampling (RUS) or the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). However, most of the resampling methods entail asymmetric changes to the examples of different classes, which in turn can introduce its own biases in the model. Furthermore, those methods require a performance measure to be specified a priori before learning. An alternative is to use a so-called threshold-moving method that a posteriori changes the decision threshold of a model to counteract the imbalance, thus has a potential to adapt to the performance measure of interest. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the potential of combining bagging ensemble with threshold-moving. In this paper, we present probability thresholding bagging (PT-bagging), a versatile plug-in method that fills this gap. Contrary to usual rebalancing practice, our method preserves the natural class distribution of the data resulting in well calibrated posterior probabilities. We also extend the proposed method to handle multiclass data. The method is validated on binary and multiclass benchmark data sets. We perform analyses that provide insights into the proposed method.