Data oversampling and imbalanced datasets: an investigation of performance for machine learning and feature engineering

Abstract The classification of imbalanced datasets is a prominent task in text mining and machine learning. The number of samples in each class is not uniformly distributed; one class contains a large number of samples while the other has a small number. Overfitting of the model occurs as a result of imbalanced datasets, resulting in poor performance. In this study, we compare different oversampling techniques like synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), support vector machine SMOTE (SVM-SMOTE), Border-line SMOTE, K-means SMOTE, and adaptive synthetic (ADASYN) oversampling to address the issue of imbalanced datasets and enhance the performance of machine learning models. Preprocessing significantly enhances the quality of input data by reducing noise, redundant data, and unnecessary data. This enables the machines to identify crucial patterns that facilitate the extraction of significant and pertinent information from the preprocessed data. This study preprocesses the data using various top-level preprocessing steps. Furthermore, two imbalanced Twitter datasets are used to compare the performance of oversampling techniques with six machine learning models including random forest (RF), SVM, K-nearest neighbor (KNN), AdaBoost (ADA), logistic regression (LR), and decision tree (DT). In addition, the bag of words (BoW) and term frequency and inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) features extraction approaches are used to extract features from the tweets. The experiments indicate that SMOTE and ADASYN perform much better than other techniques thus providing higher accuracy. Additionally, overall results show that SVM with ’linear’ kernel tends to attain the highest accuracy and recall score of 99.67% and 1.00% on ADASYN oversampled datasets and 99.57% accuracy on SMOTE oversampled dataset with TF-IDF features. The SVM model using 10-fold cross-validation experiments achieved 97.40 mean accuracy with a 0.008 standard deviation. Our approach achieved 2.62% greater accuracy as compared to other current methods.