Safe-level-SMOTE: Safe-level-synthetic minority over-sampling technique for handling the class imbalanced problem

Abstract

The class imbalanced problem occurs in various disciplines when one of target classes has a tiny number of instances comparing to other classes. A typical classifier normally ignores or neglects to detect a minority class due to the small number of class instances. SMOTE is one of over-sampling techniques that remedies this situation. It generates minority instances within the overlapping regions. However, SMOTE randomly synthesizes the minority instances along a line joining a minority instance and its selected nearest neighbours, ignoring nearby majority instances. Our technique called Safe-Level-SMOTE carefully samples minority instances along the same line with different weight degree, called safe level. The safe level computes by using nearest neighbour minority instances. By synthesizing the minority instances more around larger safe level, we achieve a better accuracy performance than SMOTE and Borderline-SMOTE. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.