Class imbalance remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning, with traditional solutions often creating as many problems as they solve. We demonstrate that group-aware threshold calibration--setting different decision thresholds for different demographic groups--provides superior robustness compared to synthetic data generation methods. Through extensive experiments, we show that group-specific thresholds achieve 1.5-4% higher balanced accuracy than SMOTE and CT-GAN augmented models while improving worst-group balanced accuracy. Unlike single-threshold approaches that apply one cutoff across all groups, our group-aware method optimizes the Pareto frontier between balanced accuracy and worst-group balanced accuracy, enabling fine-grained control over group-level performance. Critically, we find that applying group thresholds to synthetically augmented data yields minimal additional benefit, suggesting these approaches are fundamentally redundant. Our results span seven model families including linear, tree-based, instance-based, and boosting methods, confirming that group-aware threshold calibration offers a simpler, more interpretable, and more effective solution to class imbalance.

Data is the main fuel of a successful machine learning model. A dataset may contain sensitive individual records e.g. personal health records, financial data, industrial information, etc. Training a model using this sensitive data has become a new privacy concern when someone uses third-party cloud computing. Trained models also suffer privacy attacks which leads to the leaking of sensitive information of the training data. This study is conducted to preserve the privacy of training data in the context of customer churn prediction modeling for the telecommunications industry (TCI). In this work, we propose a framework for privacy-preserving customer churn prediction (PPCCP) model in the cloud environment. We have proposed a novel approach which is a combination of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and adaptive Weight-of-Evidence (aWOE). Synthetic data is generated from GANs, and aWOE is applied on the synthetic training dataset before feeding the data to the classification algorithms. Our experiments were carried out using eight different machine learning (ML) classifiers on three openly accessible datasets from the telecommunication sector. We then evaluated the performance using six commonly employed evaluation metrics. In addition to presenting a data privacy analysis, we also performed a statistical significance test. The training and prediction processes achieve data privacy and the prediction classifiers achieve high prediction performance (87.1\% in terms of F-Measure for GANs-aWOE based Na\"{\i}ve Bayes model). In contrast to earlier studies, our suggested approach demonstrates a prediction enhancement of up to 28.9\% and 27.9\% in terms of accuracy and F-measure, respectively.

We present a method to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and traditional tabular data classification techniques, addressing LLMs challenges like data serialization sensitivity and biases. We introduce two strategies utilizing LLMs for ranking categorical variables and generating priors on correlations between continuous variables and targets, enhancing performance in few-shot scenarios. We focus on Logistic Regression, introducing MonotonicLR that employs a non-linear monotonic function for mapping ordinals to cardinals while preserving LLM-determined orders. Validation against baseline models reveals the superior performance of our approach, especially in low-data scenarios, while remaining interpretable.

With the rising adoption of Machine Learning across the domains like banking, pharmaceutical, ed-tech, etc, it has become utmost important to adopt responsible AI methods to ensure models are not unfairly discriminating against any group. Given the lack of clean training data, generative adversarial techniques are preferred to generate synthetic data with several state-of-the-art architectures readily available across various domains from unstructured data such as text, images to structured datasets modelling fraud detection and many more. These techniques overcome several challenges such as class imbalance, limited training data, restricted access to data due to privacy issues. Existing work focusing on generating fair data either works for a certain GAN architecture or is very difficult to tune across the GANs. In this paper, we propose a pipeline to generate fairer synthetic data independent of the GAN architecture. The proposed paper utilizes a pre-processing algorithm to identify and remove bias inducing samples. In particular, we claim that while generating synthetic data most GANs amplify bias present in the training data but by removing these bias inducing samples, GANs essentially focuses more on real informative samples. Our experimental evaluation on two open-source datasets demonstrates how the proposed pipeline is generating fair data along with improved performance in some cases.

Data transformation (DT) is a process that transfers the original data into a form which supports a particular classification algorithm and helps to analyze the data for a special purpose. To improve the prediction performance we investigated various data transform methods. This study is conducted in a customer churn prediction (CCP) context in the telecommunication industry (TCI), where customer attrition is a common phenomenon. We have proposed a novel approach of combining data transformation methods with the machine learning models for the CCP problem. We conducted our experiments on publicly available TCI datasets and assessed the performance in terms of the widely used evaluation measures (e.g. AUC, precision, recall, and F-measure). In this study, we presented comprehensive comparisons to affirm the effect of the transformation methods. The comparison results and statistical test proved that most of the proposed data transformation based optimized models improve the performance of CCP significantly. Overall, an efficient and optimized CCP model for the telecommunication industry has been presented through this manuscript.