Enhancing SMOTE for imbalanced data with abnormal minority instances

Abstract

Imbalanced datasets are frequent in machine learning, where certain classes are markedly underrepresented compared to others. This imbalance often results in sub-optimal model performance, as classifiers tend to favour the majority class. A significant challenge arises when abnormal instances, such as outliers, exist within the minority class, diminishing the effectiveness of traditional re-sampling methods like the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE). This manuscript addresses this critical issue by introducing four SMOTE extensions: Distance ExtSMOTE, Dirichlet ExtSMOTE, FCRP SMOTE, and BGMM SMOTE. These methods leverage a weighted average of neighbouring instances to enhance the quality of synthetic samples and mitigate the impact of outliers. Comprehensive experiments conducted on diverse simulated and real-world imbalanced datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods improve classification performance compared to the original SMOTE and its most competitive variants. Notably, we demonstrate that Dirichlet ExtSMOTE outperforms most other proposed and existing SMOTE variants in terms of achieving better F1 score, MCC, and PR-AUC. Our results underscore the effectiveness of these advanced SMOTE extensions in tackling class imbalance, particularly in the presence of abnormal instances, offering robust solutions for real-world applications.