SMOTE and SVMs: A Heuristic Connection

While exploring how SMOTE addresses class imbalance, I found it intuitively similar to the mechanism of support vector machines (SVMs). This short note develops that idea into a heuristic connection: SMOTE works best when the minority class forms a coherent, separable region in feature space - much like the conditions under which a hard-margin SVM succeeds. In essence, the article argues that SMOTE’s effectiveness depends on data geometry - particularly the separability and convexity of the minority region. It also clarifies that SMOTE rebalances the training distribution without changing the true class prior, so models should always be evaluated on the original, imbalanced data.

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