Kernel-Based Enhanced Oversampling Method for Imbalanced Classification

Wenjie LI 1, 2, Sibo Zhu 1, 2, Zhijian Li 1, 2, and Hanlin Wang 1, 2 Abstract -- This paper introduces a novel oversampling technique designed to improve classification performance on imbalanced datasets. The proposed method enhances the traditional SMOTE algorithm by incorporating convex combination and kernel-based weighting to generate synthetic samples that better represent the minority class. Through experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the new technique outperforms existing methods in terms of F1-score, G-mean, and AUC, providing a robust solution for handling imbalanced datasets in classification tasks. I NTRODUCTION Imbalanced datasets are a pervasive issue in the domain of classification, where the distribution of classes is skewed, with one class (often referred to as the minority class) being significantly underrepresented compared to the other (the majority class). The imbalance issue is especially problematic in classification tasks, as traditional machine learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize overall accuracy, leading them to favor the majority class. Consequently, it results in a bias where the model performs well on the majority class but poorly on the minority class, which is often the class of greater interest [1].