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ML internals: Synthetic Minority Oversampling (SMOTE) Technique

Domino Data Lab

Working with highly imbalanced data can be problematic in several aspects: Distorted performance metrics — In a highly imbalanced dataset, say a binary dataset with a class ratio of 98:2, an algorithm that always predicts the majority class and completely ignores the minority class will still be 98% correct. In their 2002 paper Chawla et al.