This research tested the following well known strategies to deal with binary
imbalanced data on 82 different real life data sets (sampled to imbalance rates
of 5%, 3%, 1%, and 0.1%): class weight, SMOTE, Underbagging, and a baseline
(just the base classifier). As base classifiers we used SVM with RBF kernel,
random forests, and gradient boosting machines and we measured the quality of
the resulting classifier using 6 different metrics (Area under the curve,
Accuracy, F-measure, G-mean, Matthew's correlation coefficient and Balanced
accuracy). The best strategy strongly depends on the metric used to measure the
quality of the classifier. For AUC and accuracy class weight and the baseline
perform better; for F-measure and MCC, SMOTE performs better; and for G-mean
and balanced accuracy, underbagging