Do we need rebalancing strategies? A theoretical and empirical study around SMOTE and its variants

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sakho, Abdoulaye, Malherbe, Emmanuel, Scornet, Erwan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Sakho, Abdoulaye
Malherbe, Emmanuel
Scornet, Erwan
author_facet Sakho, Abdoulaye
Malherbe, Emmanuel
Scornet, Erwan
contents Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is a common rebalancing strategy for handling imbalanced tabular data sets. However, few works analyze SMOTE theoretically. In this paper, we derive several non-asymptotic upper bound on SMOTE density. From these results, we prove that SMOTE (with default parameter) tends to copy the original minority samples asymptotically. We confirm and illustrate empirically this first theoretical behavior on a real-world data-set.bFurthermore, we prove that SMOTE density vanishes near the boundary of the support of the minority class distribution. We then adapt SMOTE based on our theoretical findings to introduce two new variants. These strategies are compared on 13 tabular data sets with 10 state-of-the-art rebalancing procedures, including deep generative and diffusion models. One of our key findings is that, for most data sets, applying no rebalancing strategy is competitive in terms of predictive performances, would it be with LightGBM, tuned random forests or logistic regression. However, when the imbalance ratio is artificially augmented, one of our two modifications of SMOTE leads to promising predictive performances compared to SMOTE and other state-of-the-art strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03819
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do we need rebalancing strategies? A theoretical and empirical study around SMOTE and its variants
Sakho, Abdoulaye
Malherbe, Emmanuel
Scornet, Erwan
Machine Learning
Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is a common rebalancing strategy for handling imbalanced tabular data sets. However, few works analyze SMOTE theoretically. In this paper, we derive several non-asymptotic upper bound on SMOTE density. From these results, we prove that SMOTE (with default parameter) tends to copy the original minority samples asymptotically. We confirm and illustrate empirically this first theoretical behavior on a real-world data-set.bFurthermore, we prove that SMOTE density vanishes near the boundary of the support of the minority class distribution. We then adapt SMOTE based on our theoretical findings to introduce two new variants. These strategies are compared on 13 tabular data sets with 10 state-of-the-art rebalancing procedures, including deep generative and diffusion models. One of our key findings is that, for most data sets, applying no rebalancing strategy is competitive in terms of predictive performances, would it be with LightGBM, tuned random forests or logistic regression. However, when the imbalance ratio is artificially augmented, one of our two modifications of SMOTE leads to promising predictive performances compared to SMOTE and other state-of-the-art strategies.
title Do we need rebalancing strategies? A theoretical and empirical study around SMOTE and its variants
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03819