Rebalancing the Scales: A Systematic Mapping Study of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in Addressing Data Imbalance
It provides a comprehensive review for researchers and practitioners dealing with data imbalance in domains like healthcare and finance, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing studies without proposing new methods.
This study conducted a systematic mapping of 3041 papers to analyze how Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are used to address data imbalance, finding that GAN-based over-sampling is effective and identifying key GAN variants like vanilla GAN, CTGAN, and CGAN as adaptable in structured data cases.
Machine learning algorithms are used in diverse domains, many of which face significant challenges due to data imbalance. Studies have explored various approaches to address the issue, like data preprocessing, cost-sensitive learning, and ensemble methods. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) showed immense potential as a data preprocessing technique that generates good quality synthetic data. This study employs a systematic mapping methodology to analyze 3041 papers on GAN-based sampling techniques for imbalanced data sourced from four digital libraries. A filtering process identified 100 key studies spanning domains such as healthcare, finance, and cybersecurity. Through comprehensive quantitative analysis, this research introduces three categorization mappings as application domains, GAN techniques, and GAN variants used to handle the imbalanced nature of the data. GAN-based over-sampling emerges as an effective preprocessing method. Advanced architectures and tailored frameworks helped GANs to improve further in the case of data imbalance. GAN variants like vanilla GAN, CTGAN, and CGAN show great adaptability in structured imbalanced data cases. Interest in GANs for imbalanced data has grown tremendously, touching a peak in recent years, with journals and conferences playing crucial roles in transmitting foundational theories and practical applications. While with these advances, none of the reviewed studies explicitly explore hybridized GAN frameworks with diffusion models or reinforcement learning techniques. This gap leads to a future research idea develop innovative approaches for effectively handling data imbalance.