{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/to-smote-or-not-to-smote","title":"To SMOTE, or not to SMOTE?","arxiv_id":"2201.08528","date":"2022-01-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yotam Elor","Hadar Averbuch-Elor"],"abstract":"Balancing the data before training a classifier is a popular technique to address the challenges of imbalanced binary classification in tabular data. Balancing is commonly achieved by duplication of minority samples or by generation of synthetic minority samples. While it is well known that balancing affects each classifier differently, most prior empirical studies did not include strong state-of-the-art (SOTA) classifiers as baselines. In this work, we are interested in understanding whether balancing is beneficial, particularly in the context of SOTA classifiers. Thus, we conduct extensive experiments considering three SOTA classifiers along the weaker learners used in previous investigations. Additionally, we carefully discern proper metrics, consistent and non-consistent algorithms and hyper-parameter selection methods and show that these have a significant impact on prediction quality and on the effectiveness of balancing. Our results support the known utility of balancing for weak classifiers. However, we find that balancing does not improve prediction performance for the strong ones. We further identify several other scenarios for which balancing is effective and observe that prior studies demonstrated the utility of balancing by focusing on these settings.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08528v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08528v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"to-smote-or-not-to-smote","repo_url":"https://github.com/aws/to-smote-or-not","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT-0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"binary-classification","task_name":"Binary Classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2201.08528","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2201.08528","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2201.08528"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/aws/to-smote-or-not","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT-0"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"dc6c826176481f0f","entry":"filter_optimal_hps","repo":"aws/to-smote-or-not","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/analyze.py","file_url":"https://github.com/aws/to-smote-or-not/blob/HEAD/src/analyze.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT-0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"dc6c826176481f0f"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}