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ML Academy

Introduced on day 13

SMOTE

Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique: new minority rows are created by interpolating between a minority row and one of its nearest minority neighbours.

In detail

SMOTE rebalances the training classes without duplicating rows, but the synthetic points are functions of existing positives and carry no new information. It shifts predicted probabilities towards a more balanced prior, can blur class boundaries, and leaks if applied before the train/validation split. Apply it inside training folds only, evaluate on real rows at the real prevalence, and correct probabilities before thresholding.