Question 93 - MLS-C01 discussion

The Data Science team is facing a problem of imbalanced data, where the positive class (paid users) is much less frequent than the negative class (non-paid users). This can cause the random forest model to be biased towards the majority class and have poor performance on the minority class. To mitigate this issue, the Data Science team can try the following approaches:

C) Generate more positive samples by duplicating the positive samples and adding a small amount of noise to the duplicated data. This is a technique called data augmentation, which can help increase the size and diversity of the training data for the minority class. This can help the random forest model learn more features and patterns from the positive class and reduce the imbalance ratio.

D) Change the cost function so that false negatives have a higher impact on the cost value than false positives. This is a technique called cost-sensitive learning, which can assign different weights or costs to different classes or errors. By assigning a higher cost to false negatives (predicting non-paid when the user is actually paid), the random forest model can be more sensitive to the minority class and try to minimize the misclassification of the positive class.

References:

Bagging and Random Forest for Imbalanced Classification

Surviving in a Random Forest with Imbalanced Datasets

machine learning - random forest for imbalanced data? - Cross Validated

Biased Random Forest For Dealing With the Class Imbalance Problem