# Dealing with sparse categories in binary cross-entropy

In Keras, I'm using something similar to the Keras IMDB example to build a topic modelling example. However, unlike the example, which has a single "positive/negative" classification, I have over a hundred topics which are not mutually exclusive. Every training example has a corresponding output which is a vector of zeros with 3 or 4 ones. ex :[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0 ..... 0]

model = Sequential()

# try using different optimizers and different optimizer configs
model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy',
metrics=['accuracy'])

print('Train...')
model.fit(x_train, y_train,
batch_size=batch_size,
epochs=15,
validation_data=(x_test, y_test))
score, acc = model.evaluate(x_test, y_test,
batch_size=batch_size)
print('Test score:', score)
print('Test accuracy:', acc)


Of course the model quickly jumps up to 95-97% accuracy, but when I look at the output, of course its predicting nothing but zeroes. Clearly the class imbalance (every class has more negative examples then positive examples is causing my predictions to stay at 0) is there a way to tweak the model to understand sparse binary examples?