Improving Predictions on Highly Unbalanced Data Using Open Source Synthetic Data Upsampling

Abstract

Unbalanced tabular data sets present significant challenges for predictive modeling and data analysis across a wide range of applications. In many real-world scenarios, such as fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and rare event prediction, minority classes are vastly underrepresented, making it difficult for traditional machine learning algorithms to achieve high accuracy. These algorithms tend to favor the majority class, leading to biased models that struggle to accurately represent minority classes. Synthetic data holds promise for addressing the under-representation of minority classes by providing new, diverse, and highly realistic samples. This paper presents a benchmark study on the use of AI-generated synthetic data for upsampling highly unbalanced tabular data sets. We evaluate the effectiveness of an open-source solution, the Synthetic Data SDK by MOSTLY AI, which provides a flexible and user-friendly approach to synthetic upsampling for mixed-type data. We compare predictive models trained on data sets upsampled with synthetic records to those using standard methods, such as naive oversampling and SMOTE-NC. Our results demonstrate that synthetic data can improve predictive accuracy for minority groups by generating diverse data points that fill gaps in sparse regions of the feature space. We show that upsampled synthetic training data consistently results in top-performing predictive models, particularly for mixed-type data sets containing very few minority samples.