GK-SMOTE: A Hyperparameter-free Noise-Resilient Gaussian KDE-Based Oversampling Approach
It addresses imbalanced classification problems in critical domains like medical diagnosis and fraud detection, offering an incremental improvement over SMOTE by handling noise and complex distributions.
The paper tackles imbalanced classification by proposing GK-SMOTE, a hyperparameter-free and noise-resilient oversampling method based on Gaussian KDE, which outperforms existing techniques on metrics like MCC, Balanced Accuracy, and AUPRC in experiments.
Imbalanced classification is a significant challenge in machine learning, especially in critical applications like medical diagnosis, fraud detection, and cybersecurity. Traditional oversampling techniques, such as SMOTE, often fail to handle label noise and complex data distributions, leading to reduced classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose GK-SMOTE, a hyperparameter-free, noise-resilient extension of SMOTE, built on Gaussian Kernel Density Estimation (KDE). GK-SMOTE enhances class separability by generating synthetic samples in high-density minority regions, while effectively avoiding noisy or ambiguous areas. This self-adaptive approach uses Gaussian KDE to differentiate between safe and noisy regions, ensuring more accurate sample generation without requiring extensive parameter tuning. Our extensive experiments on diverse binary classification datasets demonstrate that GK-SMOTE outperforms existing state-of-the-art oversampling techniques across key evaluation metrics, including MCC, Balanced Accuracy, and AUPRC. The proposed method offers a robust, efficient solution for imbalanced classification tasks, especially in noisy data environments, making it an attractive choice for real-world applications.