Everything has its Price: Foundations of Cost-Sensitive Machine Learning and its Application in Psychology

Psychology has seen an increase in the use of machine learning (ML) methods. In many applications, observations are classified into one of two groups (binary classification). Off-the-shelf classification algorithms assume that the costs of a misclassification (false-positive or false-negative) are equal. Because this is often not reasonable (e.g., in clinical psychology), cost-sensitive machine learning (CSL) methods can take different cost ratios into account. We present the mathematical foundations and introduce a taxonomy of the most commonly used CSL methods, before demonstrating their application and usefulness on psychological data, i.e., the drug consumption dataset (N = 1885) from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. In our example, all demonstrated CSL methods noticeably reduced mean misclassification costs compared to regular ML algorithms. We discuss the necessity for researchers to perform small benchmarks of CSL methods for their own practical application. Thus, our open materials provide R code, demonstrating how CSL methods can be applied within the mlr3 framework (https://osf.io/cvks7/).