Handling Imbalanced Data: SMOTE, Class Weights, and Better Metrics
Most real datasets are imbalanced: 99% “normal” transactions, 1% fraud. Standard accuracy lies (99% by predicting all normal). Here’s how to build models that work when classes aren’t equal. Why imbalance breaks Machine Learning Problems: Models ignore rare class (easy 99% accuracy). Threshold at 0.5 biases toward majority. Evaluation metrics hide poor minority performance. Solution…
