HHO-SMOTe: Efficient Sampling Rate for Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique Based on Harris Hawk Optimization

Abstract

Classifying imbalanced datasets presents a significant challenge in the field of machine learning, especially with big data, where instances are unevenly distributed among classes, leading to class imbalance issues that affect classifier performance. Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) is an effective oversampling method that addresses this by generating new instances for the under-represented minority class. However, SMOTE's efficiency relies on the sampling rate for minority class instances, making optimal sampling rates crucial for solving class imbalance. In this paper, we introduce HHO-SMOTe, a novel hybrid approach that combines the Harris Hawk optimization (HHO) search algorithm with SMOTE to enhance classification accuracy by determining optimal sample rates for each dataset. We conducted extensive experiments across diverse datasets to comprehensively evaluate our binary classification model. The results demonstrated our model's exceptional performance, with an AUC score exceeding 0.96, a high G-means score of 0.95 highlighting its robustness, and an outstanding F1-score consistently exceeding 0.99. These findings collectively establish our proposed approach as a formidable contender in the domain of binary classification models.